A serious man

For much of the second half of his life Arthur Miller was a man whose future lay behind him. The acclaimed American playwright, celebrated for classics such as The Crucible, All My Sons, A View from the Bridge and Death of a Salesman, struggled to get his later plays staged in his own country. When occasionally they were put on they were fiercely attacked by most critics, who thought them tedious, preachy and ill-written; as one typically said of Incident at Vichy, it was ‘the same old noisy virtue and moral flatulence’. Miller, they decided, was a relic of the postwar era, stuck in the ideological struggles of the past, and totally out of touch with the modern theatre.

Yet while he was marginalised on Broadway, where moral seriousness was almost a sin, in Europe his plays were widely staged and enthusiastically received. This was especially the case in the UK, where audiences were clearly more ready to accept the theatre as a place where social and political issues could be explored. Directors and actors at the National, the RSC and the Young Vic readily embraced his work, both new and old.

These years were also marked by his unceasing activity in the public arena. Previously a persistent signer of petitions and letters of protests, he now became directly involved in political action. He was a major player in the anti-Vietnam war movement, and an outspoken and eloquent critic of the foreign policies of successive presidents, from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush. Perhaps his greatest achievement lay in his work for the writers’ organisation International PEN. As its president for four years he campaigned tirelessly for justice for dissident writers suffering imprisonment under repressive regimes, in Russia, Czechoslovakia, China and elsewhere.