An individual's assessment of Miller as a playwright will depend,… on his own biases and presuppositions. If he is primarily interested in theatrical experimentation and novelty, he will find little to interest him in the plays. Miller's explorations of form have never taken him far from the highroad of realism…. From the rich storehouse of theatrical trickery accumulated in this century by the expressionists, symbolists, surrealists or absurdists, Miller has borrowed practically nothing.
This is not to suggest that Miller has been indifferent to dramatic form. Quite the contrary. Indeed each new play has been a fresh attempt to find a suitable vehicle for his dramatic vision. When he has experimented with modernist techniques, however, it has always been in an effort to make his characters more psychologically real, never to render them mechanical, faceless or depersonalised. It has been to render the causal connections between things more understandable, not to suggest a world without meaning. To Miller, whatever their limitations, reason and language remain man's most reliable tools for understanding himself and his world, and attempts to discredit them or to substitute a 'poetry of the theatre' for poetry in the theatre have seemed misguided.
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