I have in front of me my local theatre’s programme for the six months just past. I seem to have missed an interesting variety of productions- musicals, ballets, the Christmas play, an adaptation of a minor novel and a new translation of one of the Greek tragedies. It’s a healthy programme for a regional theatre, showing that people of commitment and imagination are still writing for the stage- which is something of a comfort after the death this week of the American dramatist Arthur Miller.

In my last two pieces I’ve namechecked two of the great artistic talents of twentieth-century America- Robert Frost in poetry and Aaron Copland in music. Both, in their way, had an insight into the American soul- the balance of idealism, courage and disappointment. Miller, along with his fellow dramatists Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, went further in teasing away at the relentless optimism of the American Dream and took it upon themselves to act as the American conscience, frequently attracting scorn for asking demanding questions of their country. The outward material success of the American Dream is all too often purchased at the cost of self-respect or humanity and at the expense of the lives or sanity of loved ones, and an undercurrent of suppressed anguish courses beneath the most apparently comfortable of homes.

What marks Miller’s career out from those of his contemporaries is its length. O’Neill and Williams both lived to a reasonable age, however neither can match Miller’s record of nearly six productive decades. My own acquaintance with Miller’s work is slight, consisting of reading the powerful All My Sons of 1949 at school, and seeing a student production of The Crucible which I found difficult to follow; a fault which I am, however, prepared to distribute equally between play and production. That Miller was writing into his final year is certainly remarkable, and will no doubt mean that the long view of his output will be all the longer in coming, particularly in the light of the changes in America and the world during his lifetime.

It is, however, potentially the last time that the death of a playwright will be front page news on an English newspaper, as it was this morning. While he lived, Miller could without question have been called the greatest living dramatist in the English language, quite probably in any language. But who are our great dramatists now? The art of writing for the stage has been an unfashionable one for many years, left to enthusiasts and politically committed writers while those with an eye to fame and fortune started writing for film and television many years ago. For while the writer may be the indentured labourer of the Hollywood system, to become a writer-director, or the creator of a television franchise, opens up new possibilities and the potential for a greater level of comfort than the life of the socially committed writer for the theatre. The kind of social issues that Miller, O’Neill and Williams wrote about are now fodder for the soap operas and crime dramas; whereas addiction, violence or injustice would once have been treated in a two-hour play, now they are written into the ongoing stories of the soaps, and we experience the impact of the issues vicariously through familiar characters. As the theatre has had to adapt by placing more emphasis on popular musicals, pantomime and adaptations of GCSE set texts, so television now looks warily on the single drama written earnestly with a view to engaging the viewers sympathies.