Arthur Miller had lived through and written from formative experiences in the “American Century”. These included the Great Depression (during which his father had lost the millions he had made out of nothing after his arrival as a penniless Polish immigrant in New York City), World War 2, the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era, the specious glamour of Hollywood (which Miller encountered through his brief marriage to Marilyn Monroe), and the anti-Stalinist upsurges in Eastern Europe in the century’s final quarter.

The Price takes up the theme of individual responsibility from his earlier work. First performed in 1968, according to The Observer, “it is a typical and beautifully intelligent play about two brothers who are pinned in positions of flight from their own histories that are as fruitless as the movements of the men at Pompeii”. For Miller, heroism lies on the scale of a man's sense of the possibility of controlling his own life.

Part of what seems to make Miller’s plays so powerful is the degree to which they are so carefully crafted to work, from the choice of a particular word through the shaping of sentence and scene to the structuring of the whole. For example, each act of The Crucible ends on a kind of upward note of dread, the narrative drive intensified and impelled by the way speeches are constantly interrupted, broken off before complete, such is the urgency and growing anxiety across the sweep of the play.

His plays challenge the audience to examine what we live for, what our values might be, and how far we can uphold them in the face of various tyrannies: a heartless economic system thirsting for profit, religious fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, the social determinants of class and ethnicity.

He had a gift for compression, and for finding the energising metaphor which would give long resonance to the play as a whole.

For Arthur Miller the theatre was always a political place and a way to engage with the present, however obliquely or directly he might appear to be approaching the society of his day. He said once that he believed a play could change America.