It’s fascinating to hear that one of the greater theatre directors we have produced, Neil Armfield, is directing Anthony LaPaglia in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, opening at Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s Theatre in September.

Arthur Miller didn’t have quite the string of masterpieces that Tennessee Williams had but The Crucible – his great witch-hunting play set in puritan Massachusetts – and Death of a Salesman are something like ultimate yardsticks for that moment in mid-century drama that extends from Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night through to The Night of the Iguana (which took Bette Davis back to the...