Professor David Peimer
The Crucible by Arthur Miller - The Group Mind: Medieval and Modern
Summary
Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953) is examined in the context of mass hysteria and conspiracies in our world today. This lecture examines how Miller’s use of the play reflected specifically on the House of Un-American Activities in the post-war period in the early fifties, as well as how far back mass hysteria really goes in the history of different cultures.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
I think that it absolutely can be used and is harnessed to help foster mass hysteria. Small things become so huge and magnified in the individual human mind. That’s extraordinary power. A phrase in a concise tweet can become such a big deal because people talk about it, spreading it by word of mouth. So I think it does have the ability to take over the mind quite quickly actually. Quite scary.