It’s fascinating to hear that one of the greater theatre directors we have produced, Neil Armfield, is directing Anthony LaPaglia in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, opening at Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s Theatre in September.

Arthur Miller didn’t have quite the string of masterpieces that Tennessee Williams had but The Crucible – his great witch-hunting play set in puritan Massachusetts – and Death of a Salesman are something like ultimate yardsticks for that moment in mid-century drama that extends from Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night through to The Night of the Iguana (which took Bette Davis back to the New York stage for the first time in decades) but not far beyond.

Death of a Salesman – such a familiar classic of middle-American life coming apart – can be a strange surprise onstage. My old friend the late Peter Corrigan, the architect and stage designer, said that the production he saw of it with Philip Seymour Hoffman directed by Mike Nichols was simply the best piece of theatre he had ever seen, having watched theatre for decade upon decade. You could have had a comparable experience a while before this when Brian Dennehy did it at London’s Lyric Theatre with Claire Higgins as his long-suffering and loving wife. And there are plenty of Sydneysiders who will attest that the greatest theatre they ever saw was Warren Mitchell as Willy Loman in Salesman and the young Mel Gibson as his son Biff.

Neil Armfield has his name inscribed on all sorts of notable productions – his Ring Cycle for Opera Australia, the Richard Roxburgh Hamlet – with Cate Blanchett at one stage as Ophelia – the Geoffrey Rush Lear and a production of Ray Lawler’s The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll which made that Carlton terrace house with the smell of the gutter seem like a cathedral of dramatic art. Not to mention his way with new plays and Spanish masterpieces. So go to see Anthony LaPaglia even if the play summons up off-putting moments of high school English classes. It shouldn’t: it’s one of the greatest pieces of dramatic writing of the last hundred years and Willy Loman is as moving now as when Lee J. Cobb created the role back in the 1940s.

The word goes that the new production of Giselle by the great Japanese company the Tokyo Ballet which the Australian Ballet are hosting will be pretty extraordinary and quite different from the traditional conception of this familiar beauty of a ballet.

It’s interesting too to see that the new show Elvis: A Musical Revolution is scheduled from 5 August in Sydney. Part of the trick with Elvis Presely – perhaps the beginning and the end of the enigma that preoccupied Baz Luhrmann with his recent biopic – is that the star has to capture that archetypal rocker’s black mop of Brylcreemed hair and the angelic beauty of the face beneath it while doing justice to that extraordinary Caruso-like voice that hardly anyone could rival for distinctiveness – Bob Dylan, perhaps, but not many others. Every so often the piped music in a supermarket will yield ‘Love Me Tender’ and for a moment, despite the familiarity that rockabilly ballad is heard anew.

At some point in the course of Dark Winds (showing on AMC+) someone declares, ‘Elvis was an Indian.’ Some of us can remember a time when Elvis Presely was hailed as the archetype behind Bill Clinton as if he eptimosed the lilt of the American South so it’s natural Native Americans should put him on their banner, never mind his claim to Cherokee ancestry. Dark Winds is a crime show and a detective story produced by that eminent man of good deeds – of the high-minded aesthetic variety – Robert Redford who has made his Sundance Festival a much-prized and feared celebration of non-commercial cinema. It starts almost as an extension of this with plenty of dialogue in Diné, the language of the Navajo, which hits the screen with the benefit of purple subtitles. But it drops out for much of the action (set in the early 1970s) and then returns powerfully as Dark Winds turns into a formidible thriller with a complex plot and plenty of humanity as well. There is a dazzlingly good-looking Navajo, Kiowa Gordon, who is two-timing because he presents himself as part of the Tribal Police but his ultimate loyalty seems for some distance to be to the FBI. Then there is the moral centre of Dark Winds, Joe Leaphorn (played with great power and restraint by Zahn McClarnon). It’s a strange compulsion of a show because it takes its Native American diversity as such a total doctrine that for some time the characters seem black or white without enough shades of grey. But then some principle of drama surges like flame: witches stalk, spiders bite, and ancient loves are desecrated then honoured. Dark Winds is unusual in the way it achieves a quality of pity and terror – Aristotle’s old formula – for a drama which has a strong streak of the tragic, even if it ends in calm. It has an elegiac quality and it’s a fine thing to see to see such a strong ensemble do justice to this many-patterned conflict of vengeance and connivance and love. You could do a lot worse than wile away the winter nights with a few hours of this turbulent homage to America deep in that nation’s heart. What is that classic account of the tragedy of the American Indians called? Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

They say William Tecumseh Sherman (the man who said ‘War is hell’ and burnt down Georgia) in the post-Civil War days, when he was not fighting the wars to annihilate the Indians, used to invite Crazy Horse, the great chief of the Lakota (the Sioux as we used to say), to West Point to play war games with him.

Larry McMurtry, that great storyteller of the American West – think of Lonesome Dove – is the subject of a new biography by Tracy Daugherty which will be out for Christmas. The author of The Last Picture Show wrote a mini-life of Crazy Horse in which he disputed his generalship. McMurtry, though, had an extraordinary stylistic magic which animates not only his yarns but his captivating marvels of essays.