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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
There are people who never seem to grow old and whose activities never flag. One such a person is Arthur Miller, who has never stopped writing and now, nearing his 85th year has just written a new play, Mr Peters' Connections, currently running at the Almeida Theatre in London.
Arthur Miller's writing career has spanned half a century. His theatrical credentials were established in 1949 when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Death of a Salesman. I remember seeing this play in London with Edward G Robinson playing the role of Willy Loman.
The plot of the new play, according to a review in The Independent, concerns the dream of an old man who is visited by his loved ones during an afternoon nap. This elderly man is presumably Miller himself. This is what the theatre critic David Benedict believes: "Given that he (Miller) will be 85 in October, it is hard not to see the quasi-elegiac but questioning play about a man reviewing his life and facing his dwindling future as being more than somewhat biographical."
Benedict goes on to say that Miller's critics believe that his voice has always been too present. In fact a number of Miller plays are autobiographical: After the Fall and The Crucible perhaps most obviously so.
I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur Miller three times, once when he came to Cairo, and twice in New York during PEN congresses. During the second congress, which lasted for a week, I had many opportunities to talk to him. Every day at breakfast, lunch and dinner we met and discussed a wide range of issues. I reminded him of a PEN Congress that was held in London in 1956. At that time Miller was the International President of PEN and yet he was not able to participate because his passport had been withdrawn by the infamous un-American Activities Committee.
That incident was portrayed in his forceful play The Crucible. The play was written at a time, he said, in the early fifties, when the US was in the grip of a very powerful hysteria -- a terror of communism -- and people who were accused of having sympathy for communists were sometimes destroyed by the accusation. The terrible thing about this, he went on to say, "is that as soon as you question authority you are suspect, even though you may question it for the good of your country. The guarantees that normally we live with -- the customs of decency etc., are thrown overboard and we are naked to our enemies and to the power of whatever hypocrisy happens to be running through the authority at the moment."
I still remember Miller saying, chillingly: "It is not going on quite that way any more in the United States, but I would not bet on it that it could not happen again.'
There was another occasion in 1993 when I had the chance of listening to Miller via a Telepress meeting organised by the cultural department of the American Embassy in Cairo. Some of our writers and university professors gathered in the Embassy precinct and directed questions to Arthur Miller whom we could see on the small screen.
The questions varied but one particular question I still remember, which I find applicable to his current play. He was asked whether there were any autobiographical elements in his plays. To this he answered: "I think it was Henry Gibson who said my autobiography is my plays. They are all autobiographical, even the one in the 17th century, in the sense that I have to project myself into all of these characters and the preoccupations in those plays are mine -- they are not from a newspaper, so in that sense yes, very definitely, I have written my life in those plays."
