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Sunday Feature: Arthur Miller - Speaking of New York

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11/10/2015

Arthur Miller - Speaking of New York

BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Arthur Miller - Speaking of New York

Ben Brantley of the New York Times describes how the city informed Arthur Miller's work.

Ben Brantley of the New York Times describes how New York City provided language, characters and a moral vision that informed Arthur Miller's work.

Arthur Miller - one of the most important American playwrights of the twentieth century - was a New Yorker. In his formative years he shared the city's pain during the Depression as his family lost its wealth and moved from glossy Manhattan to a small house in Brooklyn. In this programme, Ben Brantley, chief theatre critic of The New York Times, is on location in the city to examine Miller's debt to his home town. New York offered Miller the vivid treasures of its characters, its language, and gave the young writer a moral purpose that informed his work throughout his life.

We visit the Millers' old house in Brooklyn, surely the model for the Willy Loman home in Death of a Salesman and we are down on the docks to consider the inspiration of stories from the Sicilian community that became 'A View from the Bridge'. Ben Brantley interviews Joan Copeland, Miller's 94-year-old sister, who is the marvellous keeper of the story of their early life and of the family's lost wealth during the Depression years. We also speak to Miller's son Robert who produced the film of his father's novel 'Focus' which records anti-Semitism in New York in the post war years.

And we look at Miller's themes of private struggles in an unkind world, at his notion of heroism being in the effort, not the achieving. 

In his exploration of New York, Miller was able to question the American Dream and the rewards it promised. Perhaps that is why there have been so many successful revivals of the plays recently. 'Arthur Miller - Speaking of New York' turns out to suggest that Miller's preoccupations are very much in tune with our own. 

First broadcast in October 2015.

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