Death of a Salesman
- Robert Beale
- Apr 30
- 3 min read
Arthur Miller
Trafalgar Theatre Productions and Raw Material
Lowry, Salford
April 29-May 3, 2025: 2 hrs 45 mins
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman remains a great and moving play, a tragedy of mid-20th-Century America, and the title role of Willy Loman is one of the great roles for a male actor in his maturity.
This production, originating at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow and now at the close of a tour, puzzles as much as it moves. Director Andy Arnold and set designer Neil Haynes make it essentially static, with a single, minimalist setting (a big tree photographed in the background, the stage framed by a kind of lattice-work and a couple of windows and simple furniture to suggest the Loman family home), and chairs at either side of the stage where the actors become spectators when they’re not taking part (or changing costume). Is this to evoke the sense of a chorus witnessing events?
There is an element of Greek tragedy in the play, which has its unity of place and time overall, though the flashbacks essential to its unfolding are not too clearly delineated from the “present” action, so maybe we’re meant to see them as memories haunting Willy’s imploding mind?
The play was first seen on Broadway in 1949, and it would be futile to try to shift its time frame: Vicki Brown’s costume design is true to its period. There’s music (composer/ sound designer Niroshini Thambar), which frames the Acts and underlines the growing tension – and three musician-actors are part of the onstage seated “chorus”, so play their instruments live: some of it quite abstract. An atmosphere is created, but while the Scottish folk-style tune that brought us back after the interval may have meant a lot in Glasgow, it seemed odd to me.
The play is unashamedly about male relationships: father with son(s), brother with brother, neighbour with neighbour, bookish young man with sporty fellow-student (both in the past and later in life), ageing employee and younger boss. The only female roles are Willy’s devoted home-bird wife Linda (Beth Marshall does a creditable job), and two young women with whom Willy in his past is seen flirting and enjoying nookie. There are probably feminist PhD theses a-plenty about the caricature nature of these roles and the demeaning views of women that pepper the young men’s talk, but Andy Arnold uses cackling female laughter as a kind of leitmotiv in the soundtrack, I guess to suggest that Willy knows he’s always been laughed at by those he tries to impress sexually - and that bears on his mind, too.
What comes across most clearly is that Willy (David Hayman) and his eldest son, Biff, are in a destructive relationship for both. Indeed by the end I was wondering whether Biff is the true tragic figure in the story, in large part due to the unnerving reality that Daniel Cahill brings to the character; in some ways the most impressive performance of the evening. Michael Wallace as the philandering brother Happy is reliable in a thankless role.
David Hayman makes Willy a despairing, self-pitying figure from the start, and it’s hard to imagine he was ever anything else, despite the flashback sequences and the ways he keeps up his dad-knows-best advice to his boys.
There is strong support from Gavin Jon Wright as Bernard, the friendly swot who becomes a successful lawyer, Benny Young as Charley, the decent and generous neighbour, and Stewart Ennis as Ben – Willy’s mysterious older brother, who has definitely made it, finding diamonds in the African jungle and proud of his wealth despite scant attention to the fairness or legality of its acquisition. All male types you could have met in America in the 1950s… and maybe also today.
More info and tickets here
