Talk - Arthur Miller

Although Arthur Miller lived until he was 90 and had a career spanning nearly 60 years, he is chiefly remembered for a couple of plays that he wrote and a five-year marriage he made in the 1950s. Whilst the success of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible provided him with literary notoriety, it was Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe that pushed him into the full glare of the media limelight. The press were enthralled by the ‘hourglass and the egghead’, as they were dubbed, fuelled by Miller’s outspoken possessiveness. ‘Marilyn will only make a film every eighteen months or so, which will take her about eight weeks’, he told the press. ‘The rest of the time she will be my wife. That’s a full time job.’ Later, though, the subject seems to have moved off limits. When a journalist asked Miller, aged 80, if he still dreamed about his ex, Miller’s succinct reply was to punch him.
Elsewhere Miller’s life is a conspicuous subtext to his works. ‘The Crucible’ is a metaphor for the era of McCarthyism - during which Miller was pulled up for suspected communism, refused to testify, and was only saved from prison by the interventions of Monroe who spoke for him at the trial. In ‘Broken Glass’, Miller addresses his personal response to the reappearance of genocide in Yugoslavia, via the history of the Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany. Lewes Little Theatre will be drawing out these connections tonight by prefacing their June production of Broken Glass with a lecture on the life of Arthur Miller, given by John Whitley. ER