Whyte is magnificent as the put-upon but ultimately steely wife, so attentive and aware. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning 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. His voice is gravelly and sonorous, but also worn out. He lurches around the stage, unsure and unsteady, like a hollowed-out cargo ship lost at sea. LaPaglia belongs firmly in the latter camp and the result is a man whose physical stature seems to mock his lack of inner fortitude. We’re here to watch him die.Ĭasting 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). Every opportunity to save the tragic hero is lost because he can’t be saved. 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. ![]() The death of this salesman is so certain it’s in the title. Photograph: Jeff BusbyĪs in Greek tragedy, the chances to arrest this awful momentum are both numerous and illusory. For a family long nourished on puffery and self-delusion, the confrontation with failure threatens to overwhelm them all.Īnthony LaPaglia plays the tragic hero ‘like a hollowed-out cargo ship lost at sea’. 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. His two grown sons have returned to the family house and soon they’re worried too. He’s distracted, susceptible to lapses in concentration. But now even Willy himself is starting to worry. She’s the householder after all, who does the bills, tries to scrounge every dollar to fix the fridge, the car, the roof. 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. Willy (Anthony LaPaglia) is already defeated when we first meet him, in a way that links him directly with Greek tragedy. On a stage set with a simple wall of bleachers, Neil Armfield nagivates the play’s moods with ‘skill and precision’. It’s about the dehumanising horror of capitalist systems, their soul-crushing inexorability. Salesman isn’t about one poor schlub crushed by the demands of his job. What rescues it from didacticism is Miller’s eye on immortality, his tilt into the mythic. 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. Miller may seem pure establishment these days, but he was an incendiary playwright in his day, driven by an inchoate sociological rage. We are from that bright new future and Willy Loman is still us. Yet somehow the play’s central image, of the crumple-suited sales rep facing the abyss of obsolescence, returns and returns. 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. 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.
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