FOR THE PAST two months, enthusiastic audiences and critical superlatives have crowded the Lyric Theatre in London for a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Even the Telegraph critic Charles Spencer, a Miller sceptic, “watched it transfixed, totally overwhelmed by the classic tragic emotions of terror and pity”.

I watched it in some physical pain owing to the volume at which all of the leads shouted most of the lines. That was not their fault. Brian Dennehy, as Willy Loman, whose dreams founder on harsh American commercialism, and Clare Higgins, as his wife, Linda, give powerful performances. Their roles need to be bellowed for the same reason platform oratory needs to be declaimed. In Miller’s depiction of the corrosiveness of American society, no nuance is acknowledged and no spark of individuality intrudes. The play fails as tragedy not because Willy is a struggling bourgeois rather than a man of stature, but because he lacks the element of choice. He is a victim, not an anti-hero. Death of a Salesman is not drama, but tract — pedestrian, one-dimensional and finally bathetic.

On his death last February, Miller was fêted as 20th-century America’s greatest dramatist. Some of his lesser-known works, such as the television screenplay Playing for Time and the novella Plain Girl, are deft and poignant. But there is a disconcerting desperation in the hyperbole of his advocates (one director of Death of a Salesman, Michael Rudman, absurdly called it “arguably the greatest play ever written”), perhaps aware that wooden allegory and hectoring political earnestness are an insubstantial foundation for literary greatness.

History, too, has not been kind to Miller’s idées fixes. The Crucible, written in response to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for spying, and likening America’s postwar anti-communist investigations to the Salem witch trials, is a laboured caricature of a more subtle reality. We now know, from the Venona decrypts of Soviet intelligence traffic, that Julius Rosenberg was guilty as charged of heading a Soviet atomic espionage ring.

Miller’s biographer, Martin Gottfried, notes in perplexity that to his final decade Miller “could be commonly identified not as the author of Death of a Salesman but as the man who had married Marilyn Monroe”. That is no conundrum: Marilyn was the greater artist.