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.

The other plays – All My Sons, Death of A Salesman, The Crucible and A View From The Bridge – are masterpieces of twentieth century American drama and, frankly, deserve a place on any bookshelf. In these hefty, dense plays, Miller explores man (and it's usually a man) and his downfall. John Proctor's dalliances with Abigail will undo his own life and that of the Puritanical Salem in The Crucible. The part that Joe Keller has played in his own son's death will be revealed in the harrowing final third of The Crucible. Willy Lomax, the sad-sack eponymous hawker in Death of A Salesman will be forced to face his own failures as the American Dream itself is held under the microscope. In A View From The Bridge, Eddie Carbone's darkest desires will prove to be the undoing of a family and a community.

Students and teachers alike can find rich and rewarding treasures in all these plays. Yes, the tendency might be to roll are eyes at the mention of Miller (due to overfamiliarity at times), but this edition makes an excellent case for examining all these plays once more with a fresh perspective.