Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, National Theatre

From University of Reading Typography Collections:

Happy #Halloween 🎃 A good time to watch the play ‘The Crucible’ by Arthur Miller about the Salem witch trials! Taken from our National Theatre collection.

The Crucible is a dramatized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692/93. Arthur Miller wrote the play in 1953 as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists.

This poster is for the production by National Theatre (NT), directed by Bill Bryden. It premiered on 25th October 1980 at Cottesloe Theatre (renamed in 2010 to Dorfman Theatre), London. Photo of Arthur Miller by Inge Morath, poster designed by Richard Bird and Michael Mayhew (NT’s art director from 1976 to 2009), printed by J+P Atchinson.

The main typeface is ITC Korinna, a revival of a Berthold face from 1904, made by Ed Benguiat together with Victor Caruso for Photo-Lettering, Inc. around 1970, and released with the International Typeface Corporation in 1974. The arrangement of the title—stacked and interlocked, with enlarged and lowered initials—is reminiscent of the “EndcapS” style that was popular around the time in the horror genre and beyond, see the book cover and movie poster for Stephen King’s The Dead Zone from 1979, for example.

The theater’s name is set in ATF Stencil, apparently to echo the shapes of the NT logo, which was designed by Ian Dennis at FHK Henrion’s London studio, HDA International in 1974, and introduced in 1976.