Playwright Arthur Miller's career was shaped by the collapse of the US economy in the 1930s Picture: Getty Images
ARTHUR Miller's play The Man Who Had All the Luck marked the playwright's professional debut on the American stage in 1944. Opening at the Royal Lyceum tonight, it is billed as a moral drama set in the American Depression, questioning why one man fai
ls while another prospers.
The Depression profoundly shaped Miller's writing, says Christopher Bigsby, director of the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia. It ruined and scarred his family after his father, a wealthy manager of a coat factory, invested all in the stock market and lost it.
The Lyceum play, however, is not a parable for our recessionary times, of which bankers get bonuses and which lose their jobs. "He is trying to account for why some people fail and some succeed," says Bigsby, "is there some sort of rational principal at work, is there a moral structure to life, that people get their deserts." Bigsby, who speaks on Miller at the Lyceum on Tuesday 20 January, knew the playwright for 30 years and has written about him extensively. "This is not a play about the depression," he says." It reflects that Miller was lucky enough not to serve in the Second World War, spending the war years building his career as a writer. His brother Kermit did, and was left shattered by the experience of combat in the Battle of the Bulge. Miller spent the war years living comfortably off from his radio plays, married with a child.
His first play, written at university in the early 1930s, was staged for one night in Detroit by the Federal Theatre. That organisation, spanning 40 cities, was created under Franklin Roosevelt to put actors, directors and writers back to work. Later, Miller worked for the Federal Writers' Programme, also created as part of the New Deal, collecting oral history interviews in the American South.
Miller finally addressed the Depression directly with his 1980 play, The American Clock. It had characters closely based on his own family, and his sister, the actress Joan Copeland, played the role of his own mother.
"It's about the fact that when the Depression came it put pressure on families, which began to fall apart, and also that America was falling apart," says Bigsby. "I asked him why he was writing this in 1980, and he said he wanted to remind people that it could all go away, could disappear overnight, as it did in the Depression. Of course, that is something we have just been learning."
Farmer tends the orchestraTHE stockmarket slump since August has cut into many arts foundation endowments and the banking crisis has called future corporate sponsorships into question. Sir Tom Farmer and his wife, Lady Anne, however, veteran supporters of Scottish arts, seemed to send a signal yesterday about their own giving.
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra announced a gift of £100,000, helping not only its work with young musicians, but also "increased investment in world-class conductors and soloists" and professional development of players and staff. The Farmers are regular attendees at RSNO performances and have made the donation in tribute to the RSNO's former chairman, Tom Thomson OBE, who retired from the post in 2008.
Farmer, who made his fortune with Kwik-Fit, says he has come to appreciate music's role in "the self-development of young people" from all social backgrounds. Over the years going to RSNO concerts that he would never have considered years ago, he has come to enjoy the music more and more, and adds it is difficult to say if people should keep giving through the recession: "I think we are fortunately in a position to do that, that's the reality of it. People will always do what they can if they are in a position to help, but if somebody is not, or they decide to cut back, nobody would criticise them for that."
Mapping art's landscapeGOOGLE has launched the "Prado layer" in Google Earth, including highly detailed photographic images of 14 of the Madrid museum's masterpieces. The paintings are shown in ultra high resolution with as many as 14 billion pixels, allowing users to close in on the tiny bee on a flower in Rubens' The Three Graces, or the tears on the face of figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento) by Roger van der Weyden.
