Meghan’s ‘dad’ closes deal in Everest of a role
Theatre Death of a Salesman Young Vic ★★★★★
Aside from having a special claim on our attention and affection for playing the on-screen lawyer father to Meghan Markle’s paralegal Rachel Zane in the US TV series Suits Wendell Pierce make his UK stage debut with a big fan base already in situ.
Major roles in the HBO classics The Wire and Treme alone have made his a name to conjure with. And there’s something fitting about the way that having slotted into the urban battleground of Baltimore in the former series and Hurricane Katrinaravaged New Orleans in the latter that he has been cast as Willy Loman, the tragic everyman hero of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), a man driven to exhaustion at the age of 63 by years on the road, but also wiped out by the oppressive nature of New York.
We’re told this is the first time London has seen a black actor take on this Everest of a role . On paper, then, Marianne Elliott’s production (with co-director Miranda Cromwell) makes history. But such is the meticulousness of the creative approach – matching the intelligence of Elliott’s reinvention of Sondheim’s company – that the evening proves a landmark one on account of its revelatory power: it brilliantly argues the case for the Lomans to be “translated” into a striving African-american family.
Arriving doleful, besuited, tired but not yet fully defeated, Pierce’s Willy is first seen carrying two heavy suitcases, and a burdensome load of expectations for his grown-up sons Biff and Happy and himself.
We register through Pierce’s concerted affability and moments of furrowed perplexity, in the glancing references to being ignored and overlooked as invisible, a feeling of the brick walls facing him and his kind.
Oscillating between stoical serenity and flashes of anger, part teddy bear part tyrant figure, Pierce at one point vents his frustration on Arinzé Kene’s Biff by placing angry emphasis on the word “boy”; that word gives you a note of inherited self-loathing. Note being the operative word; there’s a fine musicality to this production – bluesy music steals into it, phrases sounded in the reveries into which Loman loses himself are sung, a gospel number becomes a soulful motif.
Pierce is matched for watchful, careworn expressiveness by Sharon D Clarke as his wife Linda, breaking your heart on his behalf with her pleas for attention to be paid to this man so emblematic of disregarded millions of wage-slaves.
Amid a wonderfully ethereal set (designer Anna Fleischle), in which walls and objects fly and float, Martins Imhangbe’s Happy, the younger brother, exudes the kind of athletic prowess that could lift a truck; and yet he’s powerless to rescue a man with barely a nickel left to his name. Seventy years on, my, how this masterpiece resonates and devastates afresh. Until July 13. Tickets: 020 7922 2922; youngvic.org