An individual's assessment of Miller as a playwright will depend,… on his own biases and presuppositions. If he is primarily interested in theatrical experimentation and novelty, he will find little to interest him in the plays. Miller's explorations of form have never taken him far from the highroad of realism…. From the rich storehouse of theatrical trickery accumulated in this century by the expressionists, symbolists, surrealists or absurdists, Miller has borrowed practically nothing.

This is not to suggest that Miller has been indifferent to dramatic form. Quite the contrary. Indeed each new play has been a fresh attempt to find a suitable vehicle for his dramatic vision. When he has experimented with modernist techniques, however, it has always been in an effort to make his characters more psychologically real, never to render them mechanical, faceless or depersonalised. It has been to render the causal connections between things more understandable, not to suggest a world without meaning. To Miller, whatever their limitations, reason and language remain man's most reliable tools for understanding himself and his world, and attempts to discredit them or to substitute a 'poetry of the theatre' for poetry in the theatre have seemed misguided.

Miller's experiments with symbols, stylised or free-form settings, or choral figures to suggest a 'generalized significance' have not, on the whole, been particularly successful. Where he has made a significant contribution is in his creation of an effective stage speech combining the power of formal rhetoric with an impression of colloquial conversation. His most extreme experiment with deliberately heightened speech is The Crucible where the historical setting gives a certain licence for highly figurative dialogue. Miller's evocation of seventeenth-century language in this play has been much admired, but it seems to me less successful than his metamorphosis of contemporary American speech in several of his other works. Willy Loman's indignant or despairing outcries ('a man is not a piece of fruit' or 'the woods are burning') or Gregory Solomon's expostulations ('five hundred dollars they'll pay a lawyer to fight over a bookcase it's worth fifty cents') are random examples of the way in which Miller transmutes the idiom of the New York streets into something powerfully moving. Such approximations of the language really used by men seem to my mind greatly superior to the 'antique' locutions of The Crucible or the improbable rhetoric of Linda's 'Attention, attention must be finally paid.' Miller's best dialogue is that based on the slangy, wise-cracking speech of ill-educated or bilingual New York immigrants, mainly. Jewish and Italian. Within this seemingly narrow compass of regional idiom the playwright expresses a remarkable range of feeling.

Miller's contribution to the development of a distinctively American stage rhetoric is important, but it is his attempts to extend the limits of conventional realism that will win him whatever reputation he achieves as an innovator…. It is [the] symbiotic relationship between man and his social and intellectual environment that has always fascinated Miller, and he has gone further than any dramatist of his time in his exploration of the subjective on the stage. Earlier playwrights had used devices such as masks and soliloquies to reveal the unspoken thoughts of stage characters, but no one had dramatised the inner life of a character as Miller did in Death of a Salesman…. What is most novel is not the 'flashback' technique of dramatising events from the past so much as Miller's skilful interweaving of memory and reality. In this play Miller found a way to explode the chronological framework of conventional realism, and substitute for it the subjective reality of a continual present. It is precisely this ability of the brain to relate an event to a whole universe of memories, ideas, dreams and hopes that Miller has always wanted to duplicate on stage.

As he found in Death of a Salesman (and still more in After the Fall), however, the 'stream of consciousness' drama has as many drawbacks as advantages. Among the former is the lack of accepted conventions that enable the playwright and the audience to set boundaries to the stage world. In the absence of some means of establishing 'objective' reality, there is a real danger that instead of suggesting a universal experience, a subjective play like After the Fall will seem no more than self-indulgent narcissism. (pp. 149-52)

It is not the 'formalists' who are attracted to the work of Arthur Miller so much as the critics who continue to see in the drama one of man's most powerful means of exploring his own destiny. To such critics, Miller's determination to deal with the eternal themes of life, death and human purpose is one of his greatest virtues. But even Miller's admirers have not always been able to agree about the relative importance of various elements in his work.

Some see him primarily as a 'social dramatist'. Considered in this perspective, Miller is part of a tradition which descends from Ibsen through Shaw and the playwrights of the 1930s. Such dramatists, so the theory goes, present man in conflict with a repressive social environment. The underlying implications of their plays are that society is flawed, that the majority of men are too blind, superstitious or venial to see it, and that what is needed is a radical re-examination of conventional ideas in preparation for a complete overhauling of the system…. But few of his plays are 'social' in the usual sense of that term. Their thrust does not seem to be outward toward the changing of political systems so much as inward towards the world of private relations and emotions. This has led some critics to describe Miller as essentially an observer of the family.

There is no question that one of Miller's greatest strengths is his penetrating insight into familial relationships. But to call him a dramatist of the family is also misleading if only because the range of his plays is surprisingly narrow. The typical Miller family consists of an ill-educated father, a mother with some cultural aspirations, and two sons. Sisters, grandparents and very young children hardly ever appear nor are their problems discussed. Furthermore, the families are almost invariably lower-middle-class. There are no 'movers and shakers' in the plays, and little concern with the problems of the 'rulers', whether these are considered to be politicians, scientists, engineers, financiers, or even writers and artists. The professional class is represented almost exclusively by lawyers, and the intellectual questions raised in the plays are discussed, for the most part, by non-intellectuals.

Even within this limited family unit it is only the men who are convincingly portrayed. It is one of the weaknesses of the plays as a whole that Miller fails to create believable women. The female characters in the plays are rarely shown except in their relationship to some man. They are not presented as individuals in their own right, but rather as mothers, wives or mistresses. The moral dilemma in a Miller play is almost invariably seen from a man's point of view, and to a large extent women exist outside the arena of real moral choice, because they are either too good (Linda, Beatrice, Catherine) or too bad (Abigail). They never experience the career or identity crises that affect men, nor are they shown having trouble relating to their parents or lovers. (pp. 152-53)

Miller's tendency to see society as a 'home' and the family in terms of politics has led some critics to suggest that he should make up his mind which he is really interested in—sociology or psychoanalysis, politics or sex, Marx or Freud. But Miller never makes such distinctions. For him man is inescapably social …, and it is impossible to understand an individual without understanding his society. What distinguishes Miller from some other 'social' dramatists is his recognition that the social environment is a support as well as a prison. Unlike Ibsen, for example, whom he otherwise resembles, Miller never shows self-realisation as a desirable end in itself. Selfishness in its various forms of materialism or self-indulgence is one of the cardinal sins in Miller's world. Man finds his highest good in association with others. On the other hand, that association must be voluntary, not coerced. Thus the other evil in the plays is an uncritical other-directedness (the handing over of conscience to others, or the pathetic desire to be thought well of by the neighbours). Miller focuses on the point of intersection between the inner and outer worlds, sometimes approaching it from one side, sometimes from the other.

It becomes apparent, I think, that in the final analysis Miller can best be described as a religious writer. He is not so much concerned with establishing utopias as with saving souls. This is why he is always more interested in the individual than the group. Systems—whether they be capitalism, socialism, McCarthyism or even Nazism—are not Miller's prime concern. They provide the fire in which the hero is tested. But it is not the nature of the precipitating crises that interests Miller; it is the way in which the protagonist responds in that crisis. It is in this context that one can speak of 'sins' and indeed Miller sometimes seems almost medieval in his concern with such topics as conscience, presumption, despair and faith. Miller is quintessentially an explorer of the shadowy region between pride and guilt. His characters are a peculiar combination of insight and blindness, doubt and assertiveness, which makes them alternately confront and avoid their innermost selves. To the tangled pathways between self-criticism and self-justification there is probably no better guide.

Miller's heroes undoubtedly reflect many of the playwright's personal concerns. His entire career as a writer can be seen as an attempt to find justification for his own hope. In his youth he believed in the inevitability of socialism; later he sought salvation in personal relationships; in his most recent work he seems to have formulated for himself a kind of existential optimism. Miller's disillusion with an early faith and determined effort to find an acceptable substitute are in many ways the quintessential 'modern' experience. They can be duplicated repeatedly in the pages of literature from [William] Wordsworth at the beginning of the nineteenth century through [Alfred, Lord] Tennyson, [Thomas] Carlyle, John Stuart Mill up to the present. Where Miller differs from many of his contemporaries, however, is in his guarded optimism in the face of the great mass of evidence that has accumulated in the twentieth century to undermine it. This is partly a matter of temperament, and partly because his experiences have been different from those of the European intellectuals who have been most articulate in their expressions of despair and nihilism. The Depression (the most formative crisis in Miller's life) was in many ways a positive force in that it often brought people together and elicited the best from individuals. The experiences of war, occupation and the Nazi terror (which were the nursery of existentialism and absurdism) tended to alienate people and bring out the worst in human nature. Miller's refusal to believe that man is a helpless victim of circumstances, therefore, is not so much his 'naiveté' as his exposure to different facts.

Miller is the spokesman for those who yearn for the comfortable certainty of a belief, but whose critical intelligence will not allow them to accept the consolations of traditional religions. What seems certain to ensure his continued popularity in a world grown weary of the defeatism of so much modern literature is his hopefulness. Like the Puritan theologians of old, Miller has come to realise that the greatest enemy to life is not doubt, but despair. And against despair, the individual has only faith and hope. In Playing for Time Miller presents the artist as the individual who refuses to avert his eyes from the horrors of the concentration camp in order that he may bear witness before heaven and mankind. It is Miller's chief merit as an artist that the evidence he presents in his plays seems, on the whole, more balanced than that of some of his contemporaries. If he has not hesitated to look on the evil in himself and in mankind, neither has he been willing to shut his eyes to the good. (pp. 154-56)