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Powerful, passionate and frighteningly relevant, the drama of Arthur Miller deals in the hard currency of 'social' realism and tragedy. "All My Sons" (1947), which brought Miller his first major success, is a merciless exposure of wartime profiteering and the capitalist ethic. The ideological conflict of father and son is a compelling one, and points to the way Miller develops his later drama, where social issues are tempered and tautened by the theme of personal disintegration. Eddie, the hero of "A View from the Bridge" (1955), is an illiterate longshoreman. His inexorable progress towards self-discovery and fall stirs the emotions with the same painful intensity as the play jolts the intellect.

2007-04-20 two very great plays

This is a convenient way to get two of the greatest plays of the twentieth century. My preference (and it will be that of most people, I think) is for 'A View from the Bridge', originally written in verse to echo the style of a Greek tragedy, and that is really what it is, with the downfall of Eddie Carbone and the catastrophe that surrounds it inevitable, as lawyer Alfieri, whom Miller uses as a kind of observer/narrator, is aware almost from the word go. It is an extraordinarily powerful play, made the more compelling, as always with Miller, by the vigour and rhythms of the longshoreman's language, so unlike that of the Salem villagers in 'The Crucible' or poor Willy Loman in 'Death of a Salesman' but just as convincing and just as powerful. 'All my Sons' has never moved me quite as much, but it is nonetheless a beautifully contructed play with, again, real tragedy at its heart, and again it is the tragedy of a 'little man' getting things terribly wrong under pressure - haven't we all, though I hope not with comparable results. It seems to me that compassion lies at the heart of both plays, and maybe that is what, in the end, makes them so moving, though Miller's extraordinary technical control is a big factor in realising that too. Anyway, they are wonderful, and this book is worth many times its modest cover price.