Why Arthur Miller is the playwright for our times
London theatre is on the cusp of an Arthur Miller marathon. The next three months will see five of his plays revived – not only major classics like Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, but lesser-known plays like The Price and The American Clock. Though the overlap wasn’t intended, such a confluence is not simply coincidental. Instead, it’s a marker of contemporary resonance. He may have been writing half a century earlier, but his plays reflect the Great Recession and, a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, Miller’s plays are of-the-moment once more.
As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Arthur Miller dropped out of an economics course. Years later he explained why, arguing that the subject could “measure a giant’s footsteps, but not look into its eyes”. As a playwright, he always sought to do the latter, examining the economics of everyday life.
At a moment when money is short, his plays have new meaning. While Miller wrote his biggest hits – All My Sons, Death of a Salesman – in the post-war boom, they resonate very differently against an economic downturn. Rather than reading like indictments of individualism, cutting down those chasing down the socalled American Dream, Miller’s plays lay bare the pressures of precarity and life in straitened times.
In both of these plays, the lead characters – Willy Loman and Joe Kellner respectively – seek what director Richard Eyre called “a sort of salvation in asserting their singularity, their self and their ‘name’.” In striving for success, Loman and Kellner aim to leave an imprint, some sign of their significance. But both plays are equally about what Miller dubbed the “obsessive terror of failure”. In Salesman, Loman clings desperately to the vestiges of his career, pleading, cap-in-hand, for one final shot at his job. With Middle America is in the grip of a financial squeeze, his anxiety feels horribly pertinent.
Jonathan Church, whose production of The Price opened in the West End this week, has talked about the effects of Miller’s own experiences on his work: “Miller was always reticent to say his plays were autobiographical, but his personal experience of the Depression was key.”
The American Clock certainly revolves around a proxy of his own family life. As a teenager, Miller watched his father’s textile factory close, leaving 400 unemployed. The family moved from its Manhattan town house overlooking Central Park to rural Brooklyn. In his autobiography, Miller recalled “real desperation seeping in under the doors” and the possibility the Millers “might lose even this chicken coop of a house. And then what?”
Admittedly, the Great Recession has been nothing on the Great Depression. Federal intervention prevented complete collapse, and the welfare state offered a security net that simply hadn’t existed in the Thirties. While unemployment only hit 10 per cent a decade ago – a fraction of the Depression’s 25 per cent high – the same effects are visible. America’s suicide rate is at a 30-year high, something that stalks many of Miller’s plays (Loman and Kellner both take their own lives), even with unemployment at a record low.
Perhaps the most familiar of Miller’s figures in the contemporary world are the young. If the American Dream suggests an upward trajectory – each generation better off than the last – the financial crisis put paid to that fantasy. Fewer than 50 per cent of Americans born in 1984 will out-earn their parents, according to Harvard economist Raj Chetty – a tragedy Miller often tuned into as sons pull up short.
Biff and Happy Loman disappoint their dad; one a farmhand earning $35 a week, “a measly manner of existence”; the other on a corporate conveyor belt waiting for his manager to move on. Both the Kellner boys and
The Price’s Franz brothers exist in their father’s shadows – a dilemma many a millennial will recognise.
More than any other dramatist, Miller held a magnifying glass up to the American Dream – one that dwindled in the wake of the 2008 crash. By 2017, just 36 per cent felt they had achieved it, with almost one in five respondents to a Pew Research poll giving up entirely on doing so.
When Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator to announce his presidential bid in 2015, he ended his speech by declaring, “Sadly, the American Dream is dead.”
Miller always saw it as fatally flawed, his plays giving a sense that the system is rigged. You see it in the arbitrary valuations of furniture in
The Price or in the economic shellshock of ordinary Americans in
The American Clock where, at one point, the US economy is compared to a craps game in which everybody wins. Of course, it doesn’t work like that and Loman and Kellner are its victims – humans caught in a world shaped by giants. Half a century and another crash on, Miller’s plays still stare them down.
The Price runs at Wyndham’s Theatre until April 27 The American Clock runs at the Old Vic until March 30