After the Fall seems to be Miller's attempt to draw together a number of threads in his own life, the life of his society and a post-war world still haunted, nearly twenty years on, by the implications of the Holocaust. It is a play which equally acknowledges the superfluity of evil, which was the black gift of the Nazis, the wilful surrender of private conscience in the face of public coercion, evidenced by the witch-hunts of the fifties, and the insidious and corrupting banality of private betrayals.

At its heart is Quentin, on the verge of his third marriage and unsure how he can commit himself having failed twice before. The betrayals of those earlier relationships seem to disqualify him from such a commitment. Accordingly, he searches back in his mind in an attempt to understand the nature and extent of his failure. But what is true on a personal level is true, too, on a social, political and moral level. He has lived through the witch-hunts of the 1950s, in which betrayal was proposed as a national virtue, and become more conscious than once he had been of that most profound of human failings: the Holocaust. The play is thus concerned not merely with Quentin's struggle to justify moving on, but with the need to make sense of what seems a deeply flawed humanity.

Betrayed human commitments, at whatever level, are, he insists, evidence of something factored into human behaviour.