‘Death of a Salesman’ 30 years on

Press, 19 April 1980, Page 17

‘Death of a Salesman’ 30 years on

Miller: A Study Of His Plays. By Dennis Welland. Eyre Methuen, 1979. 158 pp. $9.95. (Reviewed by Diane Prout) ' Thirty years ago “Death of a Salesman” was both contemporary and innovative. Its 742 New York performances made it one of the 50 longest recorded Broadway runs until 1960. Today it is accepted as a prescribed seventh form text. In this sequel to- " Arthur Miller” (published in 1961) which was the first major study of Miller’s work, Dennis Welland exapnds, updates and generally reviews his earlier appraisal of the American dramatist. Miller’s contribution to twentieth century drama in the English language is to be respected for the “vividness and insight with which he dramatises the mood of post-war America.” However, the plays are much more than the socio-political documents to which some discussion has tended to reduce them. “The most socially conscious of all major American dramatists,” Miller has always taken more of a moral than a political stance and his focus has been on human rather than ideological issues. This attitude ensures that the plays Will not date, but it irritated contemporary critics looking for evidence of Marxist leanings in the author — imputations which were to lead to Miller’s appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956. Dennis Welland, sees Miller as a concerned dramatist rather than a committed one, a thinking writer, rather than the cool, unemotional intellectual that he has often been balled. His marriage to Marilyn Monroe (also in 1956) would suggest anything but a lack of emotion, but though a fascinating and tempting Subject for speculation, Professor Welland concerns himself only with jthe effect of the relationship on his

creative work and whether he exploited his personal experiences too obviously in his plays (notably in “After the Fall”). All Miller’s .plays are in a sense autobiographical. Crucial to his work is the fact of his Jewishness and the primary emphasis is on family tensions as the source of dramatic conflict. “His treatment of the family avoids the sentimentality of Thornton Wilder’s, the claustrophobic intensity of O’Neill’s or Williams’s ... largely because he relates the frictions of family life to those of the macrocosm outside. His families live in a recognisably real world.” In one of Miller’s two critical essays written while he was working on “A View from the Bridge,” the play where the family and society interact most crucially, he asks: “How may a man make for himself a home in that vastness of strangers and how may he transform

hat vastness into a home?” His drama, claims this critic, constantly sees .the family as one of the ways in which the individual is related to society. “If it is often a threat to his individuality, it can also be sometimes a means by which that individuality acquires a fortifying solidarity with others.” Dennis Welland analyses Miller’s plays in considerable detail. He sees his problem as one. of maintaining a dramatic balance between his natural ability to create human and sympathetic characters and his tendency to didactic moralisation of his scenes'and themes. Miller’s reputation rests on three or four plays: “Death of a Salesman,” which has been acclaimed as an American “King Lear” or a modern day - “Everyman”; “The Crucible” which because of its treatment of the Salem witch hunts in Massachusetts, during the period of McCarthyism, was viewed as -an allegory of the times; “A View from the Bridge,” and “After the Fall.” His career in the theatre now spans 40 years. This book concentrates only on the . major plays, those works with which the average •reader or theatre-goer is likely to be familiar. There is much other work besides — critical essays, prose fiction, radio plays and film scripts. In 1978 “Fame,” a light-hearted piece “about some of the absurdities of being famous,” was produced on American television.