“There’s never been a society that hasn’t had a clock running on it,” declares a character in Arthur Miller’s play The American Clock, “and you can’t help wondering – how long? How long will they stand for this?” Whether time is running out is a question on many people’s minds today on both sides of the Atlantic, whether they’re watching the “Brexit clock” tick or wondering how long the Trump presidency will endure. The American Clock is set during the 1930s but was written in 1980, as Miller watched America’s headlong race back into the gleeful, reckless greed that dominated the 1920s and led to the Great Depression, and it’s one of several of Miller’s plays that are being revived in London. Clearly that sense of timeliness, in every sense, is mounting.
In addition to The American Clock, this year will bring a new production of The Price with David Suchet to the Wyndham’s Theatre, Sally Field and Bill Pullman will star in All My Sons at the Old Vic, The Crucible will be mounted at the Yard with a female-led cast (including a woman playing the hero, John Proctor), and an almost entirely black cast will revive Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic. Miller’s plays are emblematic, representative: they are often set at moments of national crisis, whether the Depression, the Second World War or the Salem witch trials, as the conflicts of the characters symbolise epochal conflicts in American life. Read them together and you start to get a sense of a nation in a constant state of crisis.
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