Henrik Ibsen's writing career stretched over forty-seven years, Strindberg's over thirty-seven. Chekhov's lasted twenty years. In 2002, sixty-six years had passed between Arthur Miller's No Villain, a university play which won two prizes, and Resurrection Blues, voted best new play first produced outside New York. Two years on, in 2004, came Finishing the Picture.

Longevity, of course, is no virtue, unless you happen to be a Galapagos turtle. In Miller's case, however, nearly seventy years as a writer had seen a succession of plays that served to define the moral, social and political realities of twentieth- and then twenty-first-century life. At the turn of the millennium, British playwrights, actors, directors, reviewers and critics voted him the most significant playwright of the twentieth century with two of his plays (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible) in their top ten.

Curiously, he had fallen out of favour in his native America for the previous thirty years. His new plays were not well received, even as his classic plays of the 1940s and 50s were taught in schools and universities and regularly revived. Elsewhere in the world, however, his plays of the 1970s, 80s and 90s found a ready audience. In 1994, Broken Glass, his play set at the time of Kristallnacht, was poorly received in New York while winning the Olivier Award, in Britain, as best play of the year.