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.
