Arthur Miller to Brits: Don’t Blow It : Playwright warns British theater not to let the flame die

Willy Loman strides around his dark kitchen, trying to hold onto a single train of thought. “Population is out of control! The competition is maddening! Smell the stink from that apartment house! . . . How can they whip cheese?”

Sitting to the side of the stage at the Theatre Royal, Norwich, Arthur Miller studies the scene. Willy’s accent may be a shade too Brooklyn, but it’s the character to the life. Wonderful how a British actor (Warren Mitchell) bites into a line. Must be all that Shakespeare.

Miller is watching 50 years of his plays flash before his eyes, as a theater full of Englishmen watch him. The experience has got to be gratifying.

It is also ironic. The original London reviews of “Death of a Salesman” weren’t that great. Now it is seen as a masterpiece, and Miller finds himself regarded here as the greatest living playwright on either side of the Atlantic.

Compare his treatment at home. He is respected, of course, but what has he done for us lately? The New York Times didn’t like his new one-acts at Lincoln Center, and the Broadway revival of “All My Sons” ran only a few weeks. As the treasurer of a Broadway theater might put it, at the box office, he’s no Neil Simon.

That kind of thinking is why he likes to work in England. He has come to Norwich to inaugurate the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia and to take part in “An Evening With Arthur Miller,” staged by David Thacker of the Young Vic.

The evening--it sold out the day it was announced--starts with a surprise: a scene from an unpublished, unproduced play that Miller wrote at the University of Michigan in the 1930s, “The Golden Years.” It is an epic about Cortez’s conquest of Mexico, and one is expecting a high-flown student play, along Maxwell Anderson lines.

Some of the lines do have the clang of armor, and actors John Shrapnel (Cortez) and Ronald Pickup (Montezuma) let them ring out. But the first interview between the two conquerors is effectively underwritten, with both men keeping to official pleasantries, while testing each other for weakness. The untouchable Montezuma’s leap backwards when Cortez tries to shake his hand is good theater, even though both actors are carrying a script.

“What did you think of it?” emcee Chris Bigsby asks Miller as the scene ends and the talk-show part of the evening begins.

“I was surprised,” the playwright answers in his gravel voice. “It holds up.”

Bigsby is a theater critic and a professor of American Studies at UEA. He had come up with the idea of the Arthur Miller Centre as a way of dramatizing the value of American Studies in British universities. He also knew what a good guest Miller would make at the Theatre Royal. Brits think that Yanks work too hard at being liked (or, as Willy Loman would say, well-liked). Miller is not that sort of Yank.

At 74, he is dour and laconic, a guy who has learned that you get what you pay for and that you do pay for it. What, Bigsby wanted to know, was the impact of the Crash of 1929 on Miller’s family?

“Well . . . it ruined them,” the playwright said. “But it also caused them to look at life more realistically.”

Failure will do that. Not so, success. Miller may still be a working playwright because--unlike Tennessee Williams or William Inge--he was never granted so much success that he came to believe in it. Something always came along to upset the apple cart, from the Depression to his troubles with the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the 1950s to his comparative critical neglect today. Adversity braced him.

Bigsby asked Miller about HUAC after Matthew Marsh and Margot Leicester had finished a scene from “The Crucible.” Miller recalled how strange it had been to find oneself in the middle of a scene that one had written for the stage. But where the Salem persecutors had thought they were going about God’s work, Miller didn’t remember much of that in Washington in the ‘50s. Politics and publicity--that was what the red scare had come down to.

David Calder’s and Suzan Silvester’s scene from “A View From the Bridge” reminded Miller that somebody had once pointed out to him that each of his plays had a lawyer in it. This surprised Miller, but when he checked, it was true. Which suggested that he believed in the law. That was true. He did. In the end, it was all we had.

Miller hadn’t come to Norwich with any sort of message for the English people. But having sat through two days of talks at the university about the state of British drama--on stage, on the radio and on TV--he did want to remind his listeners at the Theatre Royal not to blow it.

England had developed a rational theater system, where a playwright could find opportunities to write decent stuff at any level from afternoon radio to the National Theatre of Great Britain; a state-supported theater where it was understood that good plays don’t necessarily make the charts or attract the attention of big advertisers on TV.

But--if what Miller had been hearing was true--this theater system was being threatened by the Thatcher government’s philosophy that the arts ought to pay their own way: that they would pay their own way if artists would just “give people what they want.”

This was precisely the motto of the Broadway theater, Miller pointed out--the theater where “Death of a Salesman” had once attracted the kind of serious, thoughtful, un-rich audience that a playwright wanted to speak to. Now Broadway had become a trashy midway dominated by one or two overpriced musicals and no serious plays at all.

Meanwhile, American TV and radio are more market-driven every year. In the arts, Miller warned, Gresham’s Law prevails as surely as it does in economics. “Bad money drives out good.”

“Theater in New York is dead, kaput,” Miller said. That was the bottom line of it, and that was what happened when theater became so “privatized” (a favorite word in England just now) that only a show that could provide its investors a quick return could survive.

“Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value,” Miller told the crowd at the dinner in his honor after the show. “We all know that people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing are impoverished.”

Meanwhile, back in London, an M.P. was arguing that it was stupid to preserve the ruins of an Elizabethan theater, the Rose, at the expense of a new office block. It could happen here.