Miller talks about the longevity of the idea behind The Price, the clashing philosophies within a family, and the delight of writing the character of Gregory Solomon.

Christopher Bigsby: Towards the end of the 1960s you wrote The Price, which, apart from anything else is an extraordinary, funny play. It also treads very dangerous ground in that it has a central figure who is an elderly Jew who comes close to stereotype and I wonder if you would have actually been able to write that play had you not previously dealt, in Incident at Vichy and After the Fall, with the question of Jewishness and the experience of war?

Arthur Miller: Probably not. I probably wouldn't have felt relaxed enough to do it. Yes. I enjoy that character more than anybody I ever wrote, incidentally. But I probably wouldn't have. I hadn't thought of it that way.

I tell you. I thought of that story for 20 years or more. Actually, I'd thought of it since the '30s and I could never find a way to tell it. But I think what happened was that in the late '60s and early '70s, the whole question arose in the States as to whether any kind of a life was possible that wasn't totally self-serving, totally cynically, that wasn't truly false and insupportable.

So this play came out of that, finally, but the people had been with me for many years.

You see, Victor, the policeman, is an idealist of sorts. He can't help it; he can't kick it. In a sense the world depends on him.

It's got nothing to do with him being better than anyone else. It's that he's carried that weight of his idealism through his life and his strict code of justice and injustice.

He's all we've got. It's a thin reed. I wouldn't say he's my representative. I'd say that I wish he would win but I have my doubts. I don't know that he can win in this world, the way human beings are set up.

In other words, there are creators, like his brother Walter, a surgeon, who are very cruel and destructive. But without them we are going to stand still.

He does save lives. It's part of his ruthlessness that he can do what he does. He is a great surgeon. He takes risks lesser men wouldn't dare take and he cares enough to do that. We need that guy.

But Victor is much more careful about life. He doesn't want to risk himself or others. He's got to hold back this creator or one day he'll probably blow up the world with his creating.

So there's a dialectic. There's a Ying and a Yang in there.

You see I get very depressed when people raise serious subjects in the theatre or the movies and then sentimentalise them. That means that they really can't face the facts. That saddens me. That's pessimism.

This play does face the facts and it turns out that neither of these guys is "wrong." What the play does is run through all the rationalizations of their lives, both the ones they have for themselves and the accusations of the other. And the inevitability of this conflict is laid bare and we take it to its ultimate statement.

And I think that that's exhilarating, not depressing. You really feel, if you've done it right, "My God, we've really done what we rarely do in life, which is to exhaust the possibilities."

But of course part of the pleasure of that play for me was the delight I felt in writing the character of Gregory Solomon. He's a real vaudeville act all by himself.

- From Arthur Miller and Company, edited by Christopher Bigsby, 1990, Methuen Drama, London.