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Death of a Salesman
Review

Death of a Salesman

May 23 2008

Death of a Salesman, York Theatre at the Seymour Centre, May 15-31, 2008; ph: (61 2) 9929 0644) or www.ensemble.com.au. Cast: Adriano Cappelletta, Norman Coburn, Anna Cottrell, Anthony Gooley, Tom O'Sullivan, Olivia Pigeot, Jonathan Prescott, Catherine McGraffin, Michael Ross, Sean Taylor and Jacki Weaver. Director Sandra Bates, Designer Judith Hoddinott, Lighting Designer Andrew Kinch.

The great American playwright Arthur Miller died in 2005 but his plays endure: The Crucible is about to open again in Sydney (after a successful season last year) and Death of a Salesman is now playing in a production by the Ensemble Theatre at the Seymour Centre.

Death of a Salesman was first staged in New York in 1949 when the playwright was just 33 years old. It made an extraordinary impact then and has continued to do so ever since in revival after revival, in English and other languages, and in adaptations for television and film.

BACKGROUND

On the surface it tells simply of Willy Loman, an ageing travelling salesman, whose lifelong career of charming his way around the towns and cities of New England is now treacherously in the past. As his physical condition deteriorates and he finds himself unable to keep up the pace or make the sales grade anymore, his mind begins to slip between unwelcome memory and hallucination. He is almost visibly falling apart.

Unwilling to acknowledge what she suspects, Willy’s trusting wife Linda blithely recites the various amounts of their household debt – a couple of bucks to pay on the fridge, a few bucks on their last household purchase, a mortgage payment, an insurance payment – unaware that Willy is no longer earning a wage. His boss Howard, a young man whose father gave Willy the job 34 years before, has reduced his income to commission only. It is not enough to cover the small sums ticked off the list by Linda and it is a situation the proud, domineering Willy is unable to sell either to himself or his wife.

As well as Miller’s recurring political theme of an oblique critique of “the American Dream” (which he did not buy and which all his male protagonists either fail to sell or achieve) Death of a Salesman is also about fathers and sons and the competitive, predatory idea of masculinity which so often poisons that relationship. In 1999, when the play was produced again on Broadway (with Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman), Miller was interviewed on Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour (PBS in the US and on SBS in Australia) and described the incident that inspired the play.

In 1947 Miller had bumped into his uncle Manny in the street after a performance of All My Sons, the play that made his name (beating Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh to the year’s major awards). Miller told interviewer Paul Solman:

“I was coming out of the theatre and there he was – I hadn’t seen him in - I don't know - 10 or 15 years, and I greeted him and without a word he said the equivalent of ‘Biff is doing very well’ … And the idea suddenly struck me that he’s living in two different eras at the same time.

“Because he’s talking about his son, your cousin?” asked Solman.

“He’s talking about his son, my cousin,” said Miller. “I haven’t seen this man in 15 years, but you see what he was carrying forward was his competitive race with me between me and his son as of 30 years before.”

Miller’s uncle Manny went on to commit suicide shortly after their chance encounter, giving the playwright Willy Loman’s full life trajectory.

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THE PLAY NOW

Death of a SalesmanThe corrosive nature of Willy’s grandiose attitudes towards everything and everyone around him is as powerful and disturbing now as it was 60 years ago. He is a truly hollow man. It’s an emptiness that is the legacy of his sense of abandonment by his own father, which he duly passes on to Biff, who felt morally abandoned by Willy as a teenager and is still to recover. The number of boofy blokes snuffling into their hankies at the Sydney opening night suggests it is only too painfully recognisable as a father-son phenomenon.

Death of a Salesman

There is also an added layer of poignancy in 2008 as the American Dream that Miller so criticised is exposed as, all around the world as never before, the imperialist lumbering of US foreign policy and the end result of an unfettered market economy is felt. Just think Enron, the sub-prime collapse and the subsequent recession of the US and other economies worldwide. And this is the end result of the American Dream: the final triumph of Capital – hooley-dooley.

Arthur Miller foresaw all this and also how damaging the illusion inevitably is to the human psyche and family relations. It is laid out for all to see in the play and, providing a production has an actor capable of taking on Willy Loman, it is so beautifully written and constructed, Death of a Salesman virtually tells itself.

This production is blessed and carried by the omnipresence of Sean Taylor as Willy. It is a magnetic, mesmerising performance as he lashes out in his anger and misery, in a chimera of his own making (day dreams of past greatness, hallucinations of his dead brother, memories of childhood). His illusion is that what maketh a man is to be “well liked”, without stopping for one moment to consider what that might mean.

Taylor casts about liked a wounded, blinded leviathan, unwittingly threatening all about him but hurting himself most of all. It is a tremendous, tragic performance.

The other actors – led by Jacki Weaver as the heart-rendingly uncertain, down-trodden but staunch wife and mother – keep up as well as they can. In particular, Anthony Gooley as Biff is convincing as the jock-turned wanderer who finally works out that finding himself in his own way is not a sell-out.

Some members of the cast are more able than others. Adriano Cappelletta and Norman Coburn, for instance, seem out of their depth and often puzzled. Tom O’Sullivan as Biff’s libidinous brother Happy could have wandered in from a Noel Coward comedy; while the women in the supporting roles are burdened by the silliest millinery this side of Royal Randwick: upstaged by feathers is a rotten fate.

Actually, if Sean Taylor and the play itself were not so overwhelmingly excellent and powerful, the production might have been sunk by a bewilderingly pointless set. The York is a difficult space at the best of times and this setting and the way the actors are directed on and around it make the worst of the awkward sightlines and thrust stage. There is no logic in the layout of the set (the Lomans’ house in lower middle class Yonkers), which is a two-level series of circular areas constructed in heavy timber veneer and dominated by beds. Those of the two boys are on an upper level and are perilously and ridiculously reached via their parents’ bedroom. (The Lomans would most likely have had twin beds too, in the late 1940s, but no matter.)

When not manoeuvring in or around the timber veneer (all except Jacki Weaver have to duck) actors appear and disappear through a curtain at the rear of the set or in no-man’s-land on either side. The effect is neither realistic nor stylised nor abstract and there is little evidence of a coherent creative concept. The lighting is similarly patchy and the costumes are on a par with the feathered chapeaux: confused and distracting.

Nevertheless, Death of a Salesman is one of the great plays of the 20th century and Sean Taylor inhabits the skin and mind of Willy Loman as if born to play him. If he has done finer work I haven’t seen it. Bravo.

 

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