Finishing the Picture, which Arthur Miller had first sketched out in 1977–8, is something more than a dramatisation of a struggle to finish a film, of the competing necessities, ambitions, psychological compulsions of a group of people who come together to serve art and commerce. It is a study of power and the price of creativity. It is an account of individual lives and a culture at risk of losing a sense of purpose and direction. It is a dramatisation of a life balanced between performance and being. What, after all, is real in a context of those who come together to construct a fiction, which nonetheless is designed to capture truth? As a character observes, ‘Life isn't real to movie people.’ Yet at the same time, as is said of Kitty, the damaged movie star at the centre of the play, ‘she's more real than people like us who live in the sunlight’.

Beyond the immediate action, which centres on whether a film can continue, over budget and with a star seemingly slipping into a private world, in an election year in which politicians are arguing over the future of the country and the sky is lit by flames, there is more than a hint of apocalypse. There are decisions to be made not only here on the location of a film but also in a society poised between its own utopian myths and the pragmatics of the material world.