At a time when the American theatre was turning its back on what it dismissed as ‘well-made plays’, staging works that were not designed to transcend the moment, Arthur Miller created a drama that was not only ‘well made’ in its own right but took as a central metaphor a roomful of antique furniture which was itself well crafted and redolent of another time. When society was engaged with immediate political issues, he seemed to be concerned with yesterday's demands upon the present. If the theatre was intent on deconstructing character, plot and language, he was committed to asserting their centrality. At a time when the irrational was seen as a primary resource against a seemingly dangerous rationality, a soulless technology and perverted science, he chose to stress and deploy a rational analysis, to see morality as rooted in causality.

Yet the fact is that The Price, written in 1967 and produced in 1968, was offered as a response to the moment. If it was a reaction against the bleak metaphysics of the absurd and the neo-romanticism of theatre groups which deified feeling over thought, pitched the body against the machine and stressed improvisation as the correlative of a natural existentialism, it was also a work with a politics of its own. This politics, he insisted, bore directly on those political events which some accused him of side-stepping.