THE BBC performed its biggest schmaltzfest on Friday since — well, since the death of John Peel. The first ten minutes on Radio Four’s six o’clock news were devoted to a canonisation of Arthur Miller. Miller was a famous playwright, of course, but not worth as much fuss as a royal wedding — even according to the warped criteria of the BBC. But the crocodile tears were simply to tell us that, for the apparatchiks in the BBC, Miller was “one of us”.
He was an impeccably serious-minded leftie, a preacher of the liberal agenda. But was he any good as a playwright? Yes, quite good — in the way that George Bernard Shaw was quite good. But, as with Shaw, all Miller’s characters were types, not living individuals, and his favourite type was the victim. Miller shared with Shaw a complete lack of humour. There isn’t a single joke in the entire Miller oeuvre. Even Harold Pinter, whom the BBC wheeled out for his mawkish tribute, occasionally interrupts his agitprop with a joke.
Miller was sincere, as Brecht was sincere — that is to say as a preacher. He resembles a Calvinist godfather, come to give cheerful capitalists the good news of their damnation. This is a grievous fault in a playwright, whose job is to make us think we are observing reality.
Miller was no innovator. His plays are as conventionally worthy as Rattigan’s. They are also self-consciously theatrical. The goings-on on stage never allow for the suspension of disbelief which is the essence of all successful drama. We are always aware that we are at a play.
But perhaps Miller’s prophetic message was enough to cover these multitude of sins? No. He skewed the evidence to massage the prejudices of the in-house Left. They say he was on the side of the angels in The Crucible, where the Salem witch-hunts were the meagre veneer for an attack on anti-communism. But America had reason enough to fear communist expansion in the 1950s: the Soviet Union had massacred 40 million of its own citizens, acquired atomic weapons, seized Berlin and was promoting war in Korea as a first move in the “domino effect” by which totalitarian communists hoped to conquer the world.
Advertisement
There were no witches in Salem, Mr Miller. But there were plenty of communist enemies of the state in America.
Peter Mullen is chaplain to the Stock Exchange and rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill