Golden Years

Arthur Miller, the American playwright, is dead. He was 89. This was just announced on the 4pm BBC news on Radio 2.

This passing marks yet another closure on the living memory of the golden years that were the twentieth century. Miller had a great life. A troubled one, no doubt, between communist "witch hunts" and his tempestuous marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Yet, no one will deny that he is among the foremost playwrights of the second half of the last century.

On a personal note, when I was a trainee at the BBC in the mid-1980s I worked with a recording of the Chinese version of Death of a Salesman, probably his best known play. It was remarkable to see how interested some Chinese theatre-makers were in this play about a pathetic man and his family. Another time, about six or seven years ago, during my postgraduate studies in New York, I handled a polite letter of rejection he sent to a professor who invited him to a symposium at our university. This was also about the time that New York's West 49th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue was renamed Arthur Miller Way.

Although I was never a great fan of his work, I really liked the film version of The Crucible starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder. One of the most remarkable lines in American dramatic literature comes from The Crucible: "Perhaps God damns less a liar than he who throws his life away."

I have a feeling that either one of the film versions of his plays or some documentary about him will appear on TV over the next couple of days.