Arthur Miller's latest play, Mr Peters' Connections, directed by Garry Hynes, which opened this week in New York, has been deemed short on drama but big on curiosity value. The play centres around the memories of a retired pilot, played by Peter Falk - Colombo to you and me. The play exists in the memories of this old man, and among them is a former lover, who obviously evokes Miller's former wife, Marilyn Monroe. Writing in the New York Daily News, Fintan O'Toole says that the play is Miller's most personal since After The Fall.

He makes sense of it as a play written out of the pain of living in a time and country which the writer no longer understands: "Miller, in other words, makes a virtue of necessity. He pines for the America in which his own best work made sense, but faces the bitter truth that it has slipped from his grasp. And he creates a play from this sense of loss." In the New York Times, Ben Brantley is less patient with the rambling, introspective nature of the work, but agrees that it is true to the corpus of his work: "Miller has never really been the hard-core realist he is often assumed to be. Death Of A Sales- man, after all, was originally titled The Inside Of My Head, and in its stage directions, Mr. Miller described the setting as `a dream rising out of reality.' "

He adds, however: "Neither Ms. Hynes, the Irish director who brought such fire to The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, nor Mr. Falk, manages to invest the proceedings with much tension of immediacy."