"A great man of world theatre and a great American": that simple tribute from Irish director Garry Hynes serves as the perfect epithet for the playwright Arthur Miller, a writer whose major plays are among the finest achievements of twentieth century drama.
He will, of course, be remembered too for his encounter with celebrity - his short, turbulent marriage to Marilyn Monroe - and for his dignified, unyielding response when he attracted the attention of the House UnAmerican Activity Committee during the 1950s. But the work he produced for the stage will be his enduring legacy.
There are many ways to describe Miller's career as a writer: courageous, challenging, noble and ennobling. Like Mark Twain, he was an American writer whose sense of justice and furious intelligence pervaded his work and his persona. These characteristics brought him into the role of writer as social conscience - a role he fulfilled with wisdom and unflinching belief in the artist's responsibility to probe complex realities.
His explorations of these realities, the tragedies that are born from human weakness, deserve that rare accolade - comparison with Shakespeare, though in Miller's case it was the tragedy of the common man rather than princes and potentates.
His towering stature in the top rank of dramatists was justified by the skills he displayed as a master of the form in those classic plays that consolidated his reputation - The Crucible, All My Sons, A View From the Bridge and Death of a Salesman which Irish audiences had the privilege of experiencing again last year in a magnificent production by Joe Dowling.
Miller's arrival as a playwright was timely: emerging during a formative turning-point in his country's history - the bleak post-Depression era and the aftermath of the second World War. These decades became the background for his most unforgettable characters in plays that confronted the moral issues of the time. His keen ear for a distinctively fluent American vernacular gave memorable resonance to the dialogue he created for these lost souls.
Miller's interrogations of what he viewed as the shallowness of the American dream have that rare quality: they lead us in the direction of a deeper understanding of the human condition and its flaws. Those masterpieces, in which he showed his grasp of how easily that dream can slip into the realm of nightmare, will last as long as good theatre is central to the values we subscribe to. The great shame is that Miller was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
