Robert Tanitch reviews Death of a Salesman at Noel Coward Theatre, London
2015 is the centenary of Arthur Miller’s birth. So it is a good moment for the RSC to be reviving Death of a Salesman, one of the great American plays of the 20th century, which is right up there with Miller’s other masterpieces, All My Sons, The Crucible and View from the Bridge, all of which have been successfully revived recently.
“I believe,” wrote Arthur Miller, “that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings are.” His story of Willy Loman, a little man who remained little all his life, is a parable on the American Dream after the Dream has gone sour.
63-year-old Loman (Antony Sher) is still driving 700 miles to his destination and when he gets there, nobody knows him anymore, nobody welcomes him. The old buyers, who could help him, are either retired or dead.
Harriet Walter (who plays Loman’s wife) gives a vivid picture of him taking his valises in and out of the car all day long and not making a single sale. She wonders what goes through the mind of a man driving 700 miles home having not earned a cent.
Loman is a man who has lived a life of fantasies and lies. Self-deceiving, unable to confront the truth about himself and his grown-up sons, he is in a permanent state of denial. He claims he made a good sale in 1928, the year before the Wall Street Crash. Did he? Was he ever any good? Did he ever have a heyday?
When the play was first produced in 1949, such was its impact on audiences, that Bernard Gimbel, head of one of New York’s largest department stores, immediately gave orders that none of his employees was to be fired for being over-age.
Death of a Salesman is a play of memory. There are no flashbacks, Miller insisted, only daydreams. The action is happening in Loman’s mind now. (At one point Miller was going to call the play The Inside of His Head.)
The constant transitions from reality to memory to fantasy and back present staging difficulties which have not always been solved satisfactorily by the director, Greg Doran, and his designer Stephen Brimson Lewis, now that the production has transferred from the Stratford thrust stage to the London proscenium arch stage.
Willy Loman was written for a small man but created by a big actor, Lee J.Cobb. Since then it has been played by both “walruses” (Frederick Marsh, Paul Muni, George C.Scott, Brian Dennehy) and “shrimps” (Hugh Cronyn, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Mitchell, Alun Armstrong).
It’s a great role for Antony Sher, who is particularly adept with the uncontrollable angry outbursts. There is a memorable scene when he is brutally fired by his young boss who is totally indifferent to the thirty-four years he has given to the firm.
There is also a fine performance by Alex Hassell as his eldest son, who had so much promise in his youth and never made it.
To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website
