Joe Bloggs

And if this be treason

Arthur Miller is probably my favourite modern playwright. This may well be because I haven't seen enough of Pinter (and that which I have I've found difficult). Ditto Beckett. David Mamet doesn't have the gravitas and, good as they are, the likes of Osborne and Alan Ayckbourn are too parochial.

I was interested to read that Miller is about to exorcise the ghost of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe by writing a play called Finishing the Picture. I was even more interested to read that Miller is not liked much in the United States. The linked article suggests this is as much for his perceived "defiling of Marilyn's memory" as anything else, but I wonder if it is also a legacy of when he was brought to trial for contempt of Congress in the 1950s. (Charges he was eventually cleared of.) Here is an article from the June 1957 edition of Esquire Magazine in which John Steinbeck defends Miller and hits out at the 'if you're not with us, you're against us' culture at the time of the McCarthy witch-hunts. All the more relevant because that very culture is rearing its threatening head again under the current U.S. administration.