Broken Glass Duke of York's, London

A View from the Bridge Bristol Old Vic

Why do the English love Arthur Miller? Or, at least, why does he keep getting major productions and respectful, even reverent, reviews? English audiences usually admire wit, charm, cleverness, and eccentricity - with which Miller has not even a nodding acquaintance. Or they look to foreign authors for the moral or emotional force often lacking in the local product. Yet Miller doesn't exhibit either of these: instead of passion, he gives us hand-wringing.

Meeting Arthur Miller is awesome. He stands at the door in chinos and shirtsleeves, a huge figure in 20th-century American literature and - thanks to his second marriage to Marilyn Monroe - popular culture.

Willy Loman, whose job consumed him in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, still lives today - perhaps selling photocopiers for Xerox Corporation. That's the conclusion of David Dorsey, whose new book The Force provides an inside view of the dog-eat-dog world of the giant organisation's sales force. The hustlers who chase sales targets in the pressure cooker of one of the world's hottest markets can either wind up winners basking in privilege or losers reduced to the ranks and the scorn of their peers. Like Loman, many snap. The motive for enduring all this is not cash, Dorsey tells Phil Reeves, but a desire to be liked . . .

Arthur Miller's Broken Glass, currently on Broadway, comes to the National Theatre in August in a revised version. Meanwhile, Kenneth Branagh is in negotiation to direct Miller's own screenplay of his classic The Crucible . . .

Hans Sahl, writer and translator, died 27 April, aged 90. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he fled to the US and worked as a translator. Known for his translations into German of the plays of Arthur Miller, John Osborne and Tennessee Williams. His novel Die Wenigen und die Vielen (1957) is considered one of the great books about life in exile. Awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize in 1979 and the Goethe Medal in 1991.

There are, in fact, five characters in Arthur Miller's The Last Yankee, only one is in such a state of depression that she never gets out of bed. The others, fortunately for the play, are at a different stage - one where they can talk about it. And they talk about it so well that the Young Vic's fine production - not an obvious bet for commercial success - first sold out, then extended its run and now moves to the West End.

FOR A show cast up to the nines, starring Maggie Smith and directed by Nicholas Hytner, it may seem perverse to start with the set, but if there is one thing that defines this revival of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest it is Bob Crowley's design for the second act.

Anna Karenina (Tricycle, 071-328 1000). Helen Edmundson's masterly reworking of Tolstoy's novel with a stunning Anna by Teresa Banham.

'Our revels now are ended: these our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air.' (The Tempest)

HOW would America's founding fathers respond if they could see what posterity has done to their earthly paradise? That is the loaded question Arthur Miller puts in The Last Yankee, and it prompts his best play for a decade. Those who considered Miller a spent force after The Ride Down Mt Morgan must eat their words.

'Y ou're 75. Stop writing for Chrissake and give the rest of us a break.' This was Arnold Wesker's jokey reverential message to Arthur Miller in 1990. It's a request that Mr Miller has ignored. A late surge of productivity has given us The Ride Down Mount Morgan (which had its first airing in London in 1991) and there's another play lined up, we're told, for next year. Meanwhile, opening just a week after the premiere in New York, another new work, The Last Yankee, now takes to the stage at the Young Vic in a superbly acted production by David Thacker.

It's like flowers that smell. We'll bust a bag tomorrow. I'll bring you some.