The directors bringing a fresh approach to Arthur Miller plays with female-led, gender-fluid and black casts

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. open image in gallery ‘The American Clock’, a lesser known Miller work, has been triple-cast in this new version While we are in an era where colour- and gender-blind productions of classics – especially Shakespeare – are sometimes barely worth remarking upon, it’s still fairly unusual for a rash of modern classics to be getting the same treatment. “How can a classic text identify for us what our future might look like unless we make some significant changes?” he says when discussing why he was drawn to The Crucible – the first ever revival staged at The Yard, which usually programmes new work. “There were articles basically comparing him to Proctor in the States, and I thought, ‘god, this needs to be owned by a woman’,” says Miller. It’s not all about casting, but casting is one of a myriad choices a director makes when trying to think about what is vibrant and vital about the story right now.” open image in gallery Marianne Elliott’s production of ‘Death of a Salesman’ features black actors as the Loman family For Elliott, who is keeping Death of a Salesman in its original period setting, it was not about rewriting history but bringing to the fore a history that is less well known: that of middle-class African-Americans in the late 1940s.