Arthur Miller: Plays 1

Arthur Miller? Again? Yes, Arthur Miller. Again. If this is your exasperated response to a brand-new edition of five of Miller's plays, then maybe pause to think again. That's what Ivo Van Hove (international superstar director) did, as he explains in his wonderful introduction to the plays in this new edition that he initially had ‘no interest whatsoever’ in Miller's work. He has since gone on to direct a number of Miller's plays, finding them deceptively radical.

There are five plays in this beautifully produced edition. Gorgeous typesetting and a contemporary re-design gives us five plays for less than 20 quid (and four of them are stone-cold classics). The shortest play here is arguably the least well known: A Memory of Two Mondays, a plainly autobiographical one-act play. Focused on a group of pinched workers scraping a living in a Brooklyn car parts warehouse during the Great Depression, it's a slight piece but still shows flickers of Miller's trademark anger and sense of justice for the everyman. Written during a writer's block whilst working on The Crucible, consider it the bonus track in the collection.