The Ride Down Mount Morgan was, in part, a response to Reagan's America. It was Miller's Spenglerian vision of a world in which if not precisely money then the imperial self became triumphant. It was in some ways a play about a man who believed he could have everything and not pay the price, in a decade in which that presumption seemed to have become an article of faith. Yet it is also a play about a man who determines to abandon compromise, to commit himself to his feelings, to relinquish fear, resist death. He is, it seems, simultaneously a hypocrite and an honest man.

At its centre is Lyman Felt, a bigamist suddenly exposed when, following a car crash, he is visited by both wives who discover, for the first time, the extent of his deceptions. Momentarily stilled as he lies in a hospital bed, he is brought into confrontation not only with his wives but also with his life. As Miller has observed, in effect he ‘falls into his life’. Indeed, Lyman himself speculates that his accident might not have been so accidental, that he might have reached a point at which it had become psychologically necessary to understand himself and a world that suddenly seems to be slipping away from him.

‘The point of the exercise’, Miller insists, ‘is to investigate some of the qualities and meanings of truthfulness and deception.’ Lyman Felt is