Much of European drama updates or plays variations on the Book of Job. Honourable if sometimes smug men, from Oedipus through Othello to Strindberg's Father, get poleaxed, if not by God, by some mix of fate, other people and their own flaws. Why then did Arthur Miller begin his Broadway career in 1944 with an anti-Job play whose ultra-lucky protagonist can't buy a grotty garage without a state highway suddenly materialising beside it or his putative father-in-law getting accidentally killed moments after he has viciously rejected him?

I can't adequately answer that question, especially since the abundant references to American resilience and European fatalism hardly apply to a man who doesn't always make his own luck, but I wonder if the Depression didn't play a part in the answer. As Miller knew from his own family's experience, prosperity could change to cataclysm in a twinkling. That was an event that always obsessed him as a man and a dramatist. And it left behind the sense of insecurity that turns Andrew Buchan's David Beeves into an anguished neurotic who begins to court the big setback he thinks it's mandatory to suffer.

This is given extra point because those around him do suffer setbacks and worse: a crippling injury, a wife's rejection and, closest of all, David's brother's failure to be accepted as a pitcher by the Detroit Tigers. This last disaster is revealed in a scene that not only shows the young Miller's precocious technical skills but looks forward to Death of a Salesman, since the boy has been fêted, pushed and destroyed by an ambitious father. But then, uneven and overwordy as it is, the whole play has plenty of dramatic colour and tension.

Mark Lewis Jones, James Hayes, Michelle Terry and an antique car that falls from the flies are among those that do Sean Holmes's revival proud, but Buchan is exceptional: an American Candide stepped from a Norman Rockwell painting who variously manages to be gentle, affable, baffled, disturbed and distraught. And somehow he left me thinking of that other blessed person, Arthur Miller.

“Perhaps I was refracting my own feelings of a mysterious power gathering within me,” he wrote later of this play. And, yes, he survived its failure on Broadway, McCarthyism, Marilyn Monroe and much else to become the great and successful writer he was. Was the apprentice dramatist superstitiously and guiltily thinking of himself as The Man Who Would Have All the Luck? Maybe.

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