THE American playwright Arthur Milier, spoke of his struggle to find a dramatic language beyond the narrow commercial realism of the American theatre of the 1930s.
"Was it possible to create a style which would at one and the same time engage an American audience which insisted on recognisable reality of characters, locales and themes, while opening the stage to consideration of public morality and the mythic social fates in short, to the invisible?" he asked.
He analysed how various Irish and American playwrights had coped with this dilemma. O'Casey would have labelled himself a realist "in the sense that he was giving his audiences the substance of their life conflicts".
He said the whole point of O'Casey's conversations among the Dublin slum- dwellers in his plays was that "the significantly poetic springs from the raw and real experience of ordinary people".
Similarly, Synge had been "in supremely conscious revolt against the banality of most theatre language". He had reacted against the "joyless and pallid words" of Ibsen and Zola with the poetry of the lamenting women in Riders to the Sea.
He called Beckett's language "vaudeville at the edge of the cliff". Beckett's language was "shorn of metaphor, simile, everything but its instructions to the listener to hear a theme like a nail being drawn across a pane of glass".
Listing his plays, including All my Sons, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, Mr Miller said his own tendency had been "to shift styles according to the nature of my subjects".
He did this "in order to find speech that springs naturally out of the characters and their backgrounds rather than imposing a general style".
He said there was "an optimum balance between two kinds of approaches: one is the traditional attempt to fill characters with emotion, 'as in life'. The other is, in effect, to evacuate emotion from characters.
"There seems to be a confusion between emotion and emotionalism. Actually, the strict containment not of emotion, but of emotionalism, is the hallmark of Greek tragic plays, of Moliere and Racine, and the Japanese Noh plays, while Shakespeare, it seems to me, is the fusion of idea and feeling. It is by no means the abstracting of emotion I distrust - on the contrary, it is the substitution of fashionably abstracted ironies in place of feeling."