Miller’s never-before-seen drama, set in the dark, dangerous world of New York’s waterfront, unlocked the playwright’s identity – and sowed the seeds of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe

New Arthur Miller plays don’t turn up every day – least of all in Northampton. That, though, is where The Hook is being staged for the first time. The world premiere is one of the biggest events of the American playwright’s centenary year. It’s not just any old new play, either. It’s one that unlocks Miller’s identity as both an artist and an individual.

Without it, there would probably be no On the Waterfront. It might be the most influential film never ​made

This is the script – “a play for the screen,” he called it – that indirectly triggers Miller’s summons to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). It sowed the seeds of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his professional split from director Elia Kazan. Without The Hook, he probably wouldn’t have written The Crucible or A View from the Bridge, nor would Kazan have made On the Waterfront. It might be the most influential film never made.

Don’t think staging it is an exercise in theatrical history, though. Sixty-six years on, The Hook is unnervingly prescient. Its focus is the exploited workforce and union corruption in New York’s docks. “It talks about the living wage, zero-hours contracts and industrial communities on the brink of enormous change,” says director James Dacre, adamant that he wouldn’t programme it otherwise. “Why here? Why now?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marlon Brando, right, with Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront. Photograph: AP

By 1946, Miller had become fascinated by Red Hook, Brooklyn, and its docks. He saw in them “a dangerous and mysterious world at the water’s edge that drama and literature had never touched”. Its community of longshoremen, scrapping for work and working for scraps, was impenetrable to outsiders. Taken in by a local attorney, Vincent “Jimmy” Longhi, Miller became aware of the corruption and codes of honour therein. One piece of recurring grafitti caught his eye: Dove Pete Panto? (Where is Pete Panto?)

Panto was a longshoreman who disappeared in 1939, after leading a revolt against corrupt union leaders with mafia ties. His body was found two years later in a lime pit in New Jersey. By 1949, Panto had become a rhetorical question hanging over Red Hook. Miller described the dockers as living under a “reign of quiet terror”.

Miller’s Pete Panto is Marty Ferrera. The Hook shows day-to-day life at the docks – from the morning shape-up, when shifts are divvied out, to the dangers of loading and unloading heavy cargo. Longshoreman life is precarious. As Marty discovers, a few days without work brings the bailiffs knocking, and getting work often takes a bribe or two. However, when Marty stands for the position of union president, he finds the odds and the election stacked against him. Dacre sees him as a typical Miller protagonist – “a man who has too much integrity and can’t bite his lip”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller pictured in 1956, shortly after their marriage. Photograph: Paul Schutzer/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Kazan and Miller travelled to Los Angeles to meet Harry Cohn, the notoriously controlling head of production at Columbia Pictures, with Marilyn Monroe posing as Kazan’s personal assistant. He insisted Miller meet Roy Brewer, Hollywood’s most powerful union leader, who pushed him to portray union corruption as couched in communism. Cohn insisted, and Miller eventually withdrew the script. He returned home to a telegram from Cohn: “ITS INTERESTING HOW THE MINUTE WE TRY TO MAKE THE SCRIPT PROAMERICAN YOU PULLOUT.” Within three years, Kazan was in front of the HUAC, naming eight former colleagues. Miller was called in 1956 and cleared two years later.

Dacre and his designer, Patrick Connellan, have spent six years pulling in drafts from American university archives, along with hundreds of pages of notes. Miller was one of theatre’s great notetakers, says Dacre. Judging from the research on the director’s laptop, so is he.

All this material went to the LA-based screenwriter Ron Hutchinson, a lifelong Miller fan, who set to work, compiling a workable script – a process that took detective work and imagination. “On page 72, there’s a note that says, ‘Big speech to be written. Get to it later. AM.’ It’s like finding Shakespeare’s goddam handwriting.”

This sort of theatrical archaeology is not uncommon. Many directors are eager to unearth unperformed gems from the bowels of the British library, and fringe theatres are full of lost Rattigans and the like. Most of them are unperformed for good reason. Not The Hook.

“When you say a labour of love, it sounds like you’re rescuing a drowned puppy,” says Hutchinson. “This ain’t a drowned puppy. This is a snarling beast of a play. This thing comes at you from page one and doesn’t let go.”

It’s a remarkable piece of writing for the screen. All My Sons and Death of a Salesman had made Miller a big Broadway draw, but he’d started to see cinema as a more democratic medium, far less expensive. The Hook, he reasoned, could play to the sort of industrial community it depicts. However, he was intent on keeping the moral and structural complexity of great theatre.

“Miller can’t seem to write a line without finding the humanity of that character,” says Hutchinson. “He has this gallery of what, in other hands, would be rogues and villains – the mob, the district court, union guys – but everybody’s balanced between what they do right and wrong, between the collective good and their individual good.”

Arguably, that’s what sets it apart from On the Waterfront, which Kazan directed five years later. Budd Schulberg’s screenplay has many echoes of The Hook, though he denied any influence. (“Coincidentally, both of us had been bitten by the waterfront bug.”) Its corrupt dock is in New Jersey, not New York, but the shape-up is there, as is a longshoreman’s death.

The storyline is far more black and white, though; more Hollywood happy ending. Where Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando at his most brooding, leads an all-out revolt against the mob, Marty Ferrera is betrayed by his colleagues at the ballot box. One suspects that, in time, he might follow Pete Panto.

The Hook could so easily have disappeared as well. But for the digging of Dacre and Connellan, it would have stayed scattered in archives around the US, unperformed. The realisation dawned on Hutchinson during an early reading: “Holy shit, these are words that have never been spoken aloud. Arthur Miller never got to hear actors say them.”

• The Hook is at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton, until 27 June, then the Liverpool Everyman, 1-25 July.