Death of a Salesman

First, a confession: this was my first time seeing Death of a Salesman (1949) live. In the fifteen years since I first read Arthur Miller’s most famous work, including over a decade of dedicating my academic life to his writing, I have been fortunate enough to experience a variety of his work beyond a recital of the greatest hits—a 2014 reading of The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944); No Villain (1936) and The Last Yankee (1993) in England; and the stage premiere of The Misfits (2018) in Dublin have been some of the highlights of my theatre-going life. Perhaps this void contributed to my desire to explore Miller’s later works, as I did in my first book, Postmodernism in Arthur Miller’s Long-Late Period, published this year. In any case, there is an unavoidable uncanniness in finally seeing embodied a piece of art that has existed in my mind, supported by countless hours of reading critical, historical, and autobiographical writings on it. While the beauty of theatre is that no one, stable production of a text exists, as each is different in innumerable ways, it is impossible for an idea of such a lauded, remarked-upon work to become calcified in one’s consciousness. Haunting questions will naturally emerge; have I read it correctly, have I imagined this world and these people as others have, do these lines and actions mean what I think they do? This anxiety is simultaneously inevitable and irrelevant; I have seen multiple productions of works I adore, and distinctions between them never diminished my enjoyment of them. When seeing this touring version of Salesman, then, I was comfortable yet excited; it felt like seeing an old friend in a radically new, yet welcome, phase of their (and my) life. As it transpired, the work was in the safest of hands in director Andy Arnold and David Hayman as Willy Loman. This was a brutal, harrowing production that showcased the seemingly undying power of Miller’s critique with skill and bristling passion; it was a piece that emerged from the core of people with genuine compassion and social concern, who were aware of the stature of the play, but not afraid of it. Instead, they were confident in the ability of the work to transcend its age and specificity, and allowed it to speak for itself with a production that broadly played it safe, but powerfully so.As the United States lurches towards genuine authoritarianism in the second term of Donald Trump, with more and more financial pressures being heaped upon the American public, the dissolution of the public realm by online communication and AI, and the liquidation of the racial, sexual, or economic solidarity, Salesman is only becoming more relevant to a greater number of people. Willy is unstable, confused, and ultimately beaten because he cannot understand why his life is not what he imagined it should be—how many people, how many generations, who have been sold visions of unending and inevitable American greatness, struggle to deal with that incoherence? And why wouldn’t they direct hatred and violence inwards or outwards, or both, in a desperate attempt to express their confusion at living in “the greatest nation in the history of the world,” as per House Speaker Mike Johnson, yet without the basic comforts and entitlements that are necessary for a decent life? Salesman’s true tragedy, then, can best be understood when taking into consideration the seventy-six years since its first production—that it is becoming increasingly relevant, that more and more people can identify with the deterioration of Willy’s mind, and his inability to comprehend the distinction between his fantasies and reality.Hayman very much belongs in the “shrimp” category of Willys, aligning him with Dustin Hoffman, and contrasting him with originator Lee J Cobb. Perhaps it is more contextually useful to perform him this way, and Hayman’s performance of Willy makes the idea of him as a “walrus” almost unimaginable. From his first moment, he is beaten, confused, and virtually diminishing in front of our eyes—perhaps he had been a figure of stature as a youth, as of course Cobb had made Willy in 1949 (and again on television in 1966), but it seemed inevitable that Willy Loman in 2025 would be a shrimp, a husk, a shriveled orange peel. There is barely even a remnant of the formerly powerful beast he once was, and so the delusions of his New England dreams are all the more blatant. When he recalls and enacts his younger life, Hayman brings some vitality to Willy, but with his age (he turned seventy-seven this year), they seem even more distant and unattainable. As he initially “brings” the youthful Biff and Happy to the stage, he sits facing the audience with wonder and love in his eyes; leaning forward on the kitchen chair, it’s as if he is watching old home movies or even his adored grandchildren playing with each other. There was an initial concern that he would settle into an easy, off-putting version of Willy’s accent, as he adopted a stereotypical “Noo-Yawkh” twang that produces words like “obsoivin’” and “poisonal” (recall Miller saying in his autobiography that, in the 1930s, he was put off Eugene O’Neill’s work due to its “mawkish twenties slang” (228), and you can understand the discomfort). However, when he settled into a rhythm with his costars, Beth Marshall as Linda, Daniel Cahill as Biff, and Michael Wallace as Happy, he became far more comfortable in the role, and the character naturally became far less comfortable in the world. The family’s inevitable doom, their refusal to allow each other a moment to breathe or make a minor error in how they express themselves, and their utter codependence for everything from money to hope, is communicated flawlessly through this dynamic foursome’s interactions.The key to Hayman’s Willy is that not only does he have the wrong dreams, but he barely even knows what his dreams are—he has a vague desire to be well-liked and rich and comfortable and happy, but he doesn’t even know what those things look like. When Bernard (Gavin Jon Wright) tells him that he’s visiting friends who have a tennis court, Willy is in awe—“they must be very fine people,” he says, with a palpable and crushing sense of wonder. Having a tennis court, or arguing in front of the Supreme Court, are things that Willy never dared himself to dream about; it is as if Bernard mentioning them has created their possibility in Willy’s mind for the first time, but he knows he’s missed his chance to pursue them. This is the strange contradiction of Willy—his dreams are simultaneously too big and too small; he wants to be as rich as Howard Wagner, but as beloved as Dave Singleman. Willy constantly corrects and critiques himself, as he of course does to Linda, and Hayman uses this to spiral the character further and further into despair and confusion. He stutters and stammers his lines, waves and points his fingers randomly in the air, and overall presents an image of fear and confusion more than rage. This cohesion in his performance style, linked as it is with his stature and the current context of American life, means that it is a creation of Willy very much for our times.Cahill as Biff is the other stand-out performance, perhaps inevitably. The key to this is his evident physical discomfort—his clothes always seem either too big or too small; when he is a teenager, he looks older and worn out, but in his mid-thirties he looks boyish and lost. The scene at the restaurant when he tries to explain to Happy that he took Bill Oliver’s pen highlights the minor stakes these people are playing with, despite their delusions of grandeur. While some could interpret Cahill’s performance in this moment as being self-indulgent and overwrought, it highlights that this is the external validation to prove that Biff is no good, a loser, and maybe even worse. The set of events put in motion in the hotel room in Boston have come to a conclusion, as he later realizes when he tells Linda that he’s going away and won’t see her again. Biff’s theft of Oliver’s pen is the confirmation that he’s a loser, his dad has always been a loser, and that he’s been taught every wrong lesson in life. Linda, meanwhile, is the brutal, fiercely loyal, and dependable character she should be—never Willy’s doormat, Marshall always shows that she knows what’s going on, that Willy is and never has been perfect, but that her sons are becoming something that is far, far worse. With Dublin, like many other minor and major cities, increasingly in the grip of a housing and homelessness crisis that has resulted in more and more people in their thirties living with their parents and so having to stall the landmarks of adulthood, the dynamic between the sons and their parents here is a charged one. The boys at home under Linda and Willy’s feet, hearing their private conversations and anxieties, with everyone knowing too much about each other’s lives, is a reality for many people, and adds another layer of contemporary relevance.Arnold’s staging helped accentuate the disintegration of Willy’s mind, highlighting the blending of past and present into one consistently inconsistent reality. Characters like Charlie and Bernard do not leave the stage but sit passively at the side on two rows of chairs, waiting to make their re-appearance in Willy’s story. On the other side of the stage, sit three musicians who also have speaking roles—Simon Donaldson plays mandolin and dulcimer, as well as Howard; Fay Guiffo plays violin and Miss Forsyth; and Gillian Massey plays the flute and both Jenny and Letta. These decisions add dynamism and increase the fluidity of Willy’s experiences and memories. They also mean that they have greater in depth and character in our experience of the play. They aren’t just summoned randomly by Willy’s subconscious but are parts of our own experience of the play—we can watch Willy interact with his family and keep an eye on these impassive figures, much as Willy’s own mind does. The exception is Ben, played by Stewart Ennis, who is brooding, huge, dangerous, and immaculately presented—wide-brimmed hat, watch on a chain, smart suit, cane, and perfectly trimmed beard, he is a powerful and monstrous figure. Linda is right to be terrified of him, and the prospect of Willy having followed him into the jungle is a bleak one—there’s no doubt that it would have swallowed the little shrimp whole.Neil Haynes’s set does the necessary work of hemming the Loman home in as close as possible, while hinting at a larger, wider, brighter world beyond. There is an image of a large, bare tree permanently on the back wall, which of course harkens back to Biff and Happy’s youth, but the suspended two-dimensional structures that frame the main action create that claustrophobic sensation that so bothers Willy. The only shame is that they did not take the lead from O’Neill in All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924) and have them move progressively closer together to really hammer home the point, but perhaps someone should have suggested this to Jo Mielziner in 1949, too.Death of a Salesman has been dogged for decades with the tag of being “universal,” linking Willy to a broadly painted “everyman” who does not really exist, beyond the realm of parody. This insistence on its universalism has perhaps led to some backlash against Miller and his writing; many young people are increasingly tired, with some justification, of being told that plays about the problems of straight white men are “universal,” and so must be understood and appreciated. This production, and particularly Hayman’s performance, should help to dispel this feeling—his Willy Loman is a character for this terrifying twenty-first century moment, not a leftover from the middle of the twentieth. He is someone with problems that more and more people are facing, and his fate may be one that an increasing number of us share. If great art truly has the power to change things in the world, it would be productions like this that meet the standard.