Arthur Miller is a new direction for the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre.  He's American and his plays don't contain many laughs for a theatre primarily celebrated for its productions of Shakespearian comedies on balmy summers' evenings.  But my starting point for staging The Crucible, one of the most pertinent and enduring plays of the Twentieth Century, was Miller's challenge to himself to write for the Elizabethan audience; a public address on a street corner.  Arthur Miller's gripping story is nothing short of a thriller.  He invites us to telescope into this curious and fascinating world to meet a host of brilliantly drawn people who are faced with moral panic.  We board the ghost train of witchcraft and the ride is wild and shocking.  Along the way, whilst feeding his unknowing audience with beautiful and evocative language, the greatest paradox of theatre happens; the audience both escape and approach reality at the same time. The everyman John Proctor is a people's hero.  His journey to fully define himself is compelling for the spectator and transports Miller's street corner audience to a spiritual place of aspirational beauty.  In a world where we too are often faced with moral panic, or as now, when we strive to balance our own personal agendas with the immediate future of our country, Proctor and Miller remind us that, quite simply, life has meaning.  But they do it with as much infectious joy and entertainment as any of Mr Shakespeare's plays have often done either to his own Elizabethan audience or countless audiences at this summer address.