Arthur Miller's reputation as the writer of glum naturalistic problem dramas is undergoing a re-evaluation at present. The fashionable director Ivo van Hove's ecstatically reviewed and Tony Award-winning production of A View from the Bridge stripped the play back to reveal its archetypal classic structure, and his brilliantly staged, if infuriatingly wrong-headed, approach to The Crucible, at present on Broadway, has flying girls, sinister wolfhounds, and icy hellish wind blasts in what appears to be an attempt to turn the piece into a replay of The Exorcist.

Miller never considered himself to be a naturalistic playwright. None of the unsuccessful plays he had written before All My Sons was naturalistic, and even with this play, which he consciously modelled on the Ibsen of Hedda Gabler and An Enemy of the People, in an attempt to write a more commercially viable work, he was still conscious of its relationship to classic tragedy.