The economics of Arthur Miller: salesmen, dockers and gilded preachers

From All My Sons to The Crucible and beyond, the great playwright captured America's financial, as well as existential, desperation

Arthur Miller called The American Clock, which premiered in 1980, a vaudeville. But it was really his view of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression: even more than an economic crash, it was a national emotional collapse, "like all the winds had stopped, gone dead" - the moment Americans realised that those in charge had not known what they were doing for some time, or if they did, had corruptly misused that knowledge.

The play flopped, likely because Miller tinkered with it until the characters drained away, except his young self reworked as a detached narrator. The way he remembered the events of the Depression is as what we'd call an "elite debacle" - a historical mega-catastrophe caused by hubris, over self-confidence resulting from diminished contact with reality. "They believed," the narrator says of the bubble hucksters of the 1920s, "in the most important thing of all, that nothing is real."

Related: A View from the Bridge five-star review - Ivo van Hove reinvents Arthur Miller

"They believed in the most important thing of all, that nothing is real."

Related: Theatre archive: Roy Hattersley meets Arthur Miller - a view from the barricades