Of all of Arthur Miller’s plays, Death of a Salesman might have been expected to date the quickest – it seems so rooted in a particular cultural and historical mindset. It rises from a postwar United States intent on turning away from tragedy to a bright new future: a world of shiny products and shiny faces, of football and soda pop. Yet somehow the play’s central image, of the crumple-suited sales rep facing the abyss of obsolescence, returns and returns. We are from that bright new future and Willy Loman is still us.
Miller may seem pure establishment these days, but he was an incendiary playwright in his day, driven by an inchoate sociological rage. From the injustices of the McCarthy hearings that inform The Crucible to the callous war profiteering that inspired All My Sons, his work often threatens to fall into outright polemic. What rescues it from didacticism is Miller’s eye on immortality, his tilt into the mythic. Salesman isn’t about one poor schlub crushed by the demands of his job. It’s about the dehumanising horror of capitalist systems, their soul-crushing inexorability.
Willy (Anthony LaPaglia) is already defeated when we first meet him, in a way that links him directly with Greek tragedy. His wife, Linda (Alison Whyte), knows this last work trip – as he traipses around small towns hocking a product we never see – has been as disastrous as the previous ones. She’s the householder after all, who does the bills, tries to scrounge every dollar to fix the fridge, the car, the roof. But now even Willy himself is starting to worry. He’s distracted, susceptible to lapses in concentration. Becoming increasingly disoriented.
His two grown sons have returned to the family house and soon they’re worried too. Happy (Sean Keenan) has been around longer and seen the decline in his father’s mental acuity, but for Biff (Josh Helman) it comes as something of a rude awakening. For a family long nourished on puffery and self-delusion, the confrontation with failure threatens to overwhelm them all.
As in Greek tragedy, the chances to arrest this awful momentum are both numerous and illusory. The death of this salesman is so certain it’s in the title. So we witness with a kind of hushed deference Willy’s attempts to inflate his self-esteem only to see it crumble a moment later; we watch Biff and Happy get sucked into the delusion; we see neighbours reach out to help, only to be savagely rebuked. Every opportunity to save the tragic hero is lost because he can’t be saved. We’re here to watch him die.
Casting of the central role usually falls into one of two camps: slightly built, as Miller initially conceived him (best personified by Dustin Hoffman), and hulking (Lee J Cobb as the original Willy, but also Brian Dennehy and Philip Seymour Hoffman). LaPaglia belongs firmly in the latter camp and the result is a man whose physical stature seems to mock his lack of inner fortitude. He lurches around the stage, unsure and unsteady, like a hollowed-out cargo ship lost at sea. His voice is gravelly and sonorous, but also worn out. As Linda says, “the man is exhausted. A small man can be just as tired as a great man.” It’s a performance of great range and subtlety, a finely wrought portrait of erosion and bewilderment.
Whyte is magnificent as the put-upon but ultimately steely wife, so attentive and aware. Her opening scene, reacting to Willy’s account of a near accident in his car, establishes her history of concern: she knows both precisely what she’s in for and what she has to lose. Several key scenes, with Linda unleashing her disgust and despair at her sons, are electric. Eventually, she becomes a lightning rod for the play’s fury and compassion, wrestling her husband’s legacy into something grand and universal.
The boys are very strong too. Keenan luxuriates a little too keenly in his character’s lasciviousness but he manages to convey the ways in which Happy is wronged too, pushed into the margins of his own life. Helman is excellent as Biff; he makes sense of the character’s churning amalgam of admiration and revulsion, his bright potential and mortifying failure. Steve Bastoni is superb as the consistently bemused neighbour Charlie and there is some rich support from the likes of Richard Piper, Simon Maiden, Elizabeth Blackmore and Grant Piro.
Director Neil Armfield has opted for the kind of sparse candour he brought to his stagings of Janáček operas in the late 90s. He doesn’t challenge the play but he does navigate its moods and shifting dynamics with skill and precision. Dale Ferguson’s set, a simple wall of bleachers and a ghostly commentary box, evokes the famous baseball stadium of Ebbets Field, the location of Biff’s single sporting triumph. It pays off in two moments near the end of each act, but it’s also far too static and leads to some awkward blocking throughout. The actors sit in the bleachers and watch Willy’s demise, which gives a sense of ritual, but the design elements – from Niklas Pajanti’s lighting to Alan John’s sound composition – are largely ineffectual. Only Sophie Woodward’s beautifully textured costumes convey the dignity and poignance of a lost world.
What does that lost world say to us, in an age that feels dangerously close to collapse itself? Willy isn’t desperate for success – that dream curdled years before the play opens – but for the possibility of success in the future, through the magnificence of his boy Biff. That he may have failed the next generation, left them with nothing but hollow slogans and capitalist propaganda, is an unbearable truth he cannot face. Death of a Salesman is a play consumed by the advertising slogan, by the imperialist promises of branding and consumerism, but it continues to move us because, like Willy, we are drowning in capitalism’s bullshit guarantees and can’t see past our prison walls. “Attention must be paid,” as Linda pleads, but surely Charlie’s warning is just as pertinent: “Nobody’s worth nothin’ dead.”
Death of a Salesman runs at Her Majesty’s Theatre until 15 October
