ABSTRACT
It is difficult to write objectively about Arthur Miller. It was from him that I learned that modern drama has the same capacity to handle pain and suffering as classical tragedy. I first came across his plays in the late 1950s when the amateur Talisman Theatre (a jerry-built tin-hut with epic pretensions) in Kenilworth staged two remarkable productions of Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge. At the time I was overdosing on Stratford Shakespeare and associated high drama with costumes, verse and the spectacle of great actors suffering emotional torments in sepulchral lighting. Modern drama, in contrast, seemed to me a flimsy, lightweight affair. But those two Miller productions enabled me to grasp personally something that is now a schoolbook commonplace: that tragedy is not defined by language or 188setting so much as by intensity of feeling and that an American salesman is as valid a candidate for heroic status as a Scottish thane.
