Miller’s empathy for the common man has never felt more timely
Looking back from the end of the 20th century to the 1949 premiere of Death of a Salesman, the play that made his name, Arthur Miller – then 84 – marvelled at the relative paucity of platforms back then for a writer such as he, who wanted to speak to an audience in innovative and intelligent ways.
“The only theatre available to a playwright in the late Forties was Broadway, the most ruthlessly commercialised theatre in the world,” he wrote. “The problem, in a word, was seriousness. There wasn’t very much of it in the audience, and it was resented when it threatened to appear on the stage.” Still, he held faith that his audience would accept the bold, time-slipping nature of his two-act drama about a “tired to the death” travelling salesman called Willy Loman whose work and will are drying up.
He needn’t have feared a disconnect. When the play opened at the Morosco Theatre that February, his producer Irene Selznick sent him a telegram even before curtain-up: “Tonight at Eight And Then The World is Yours”.
The critical plaudits duly followed, as did the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Loman swiftly became one of the best-known characters of modern drama, a recognisable 63-year-old New Yorker and a relatable everyman, reeling in disbelief that the golden years of his family life have vanished, his grown-up sons (Biff and Happy) aren’t yet ready to stand on their own two feet and the capitalist-materialist dream he believed in hasn’t delivered.
The play raced to London that summer. The critic Kenneth Tynan – writing in 1954 – noted the odd slip into a “sentimental rhythm of despair” but added “theatre is an impure craft, and Death of a Salesman organises its impurities with an emotional effect unrivalled in post-war drama”. It attracted ire in some quarters for appearing to knock American values, but its universality won out. “Being human … is something most of us fail at most of the time,” Miller concluded in 1999, “and a little mercy is eminently in order given the societies we live in, which purport to be stable and sound as mountains when they are all trembling in a fast wind blowing mindlessly around the earth”. That mercy is abundantly in evidence in some of its most famous lines – when Willy’s careworn wife Linda rebukes her sons for their lack of filial respect.
The context
Towards the end of act one, Willy, having had an imaginary conversation with his dead, once fortune-seeking brother Ben, wanders outside the kitchen. “What the hell is the matter with him?” demands Biff of Linda, who starts making excuses for her husband. “Your hair got so grey,” the youth notices. “Oh, it’s been grey since you were in high school. I just stopped dyeing it, that’s all,” she replies. “One day you’ll knock on this door and there’ll be strange people here.” Biff, sitting on painful youthful knowledge of Willy’s marital infidelity, carries on with his attacks, before Linda retorts, anguished, acknowledging his flaws.
What’s in the speech
“He’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.
Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person… A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man,” she continues, bewailing the fact that Willy is back on commission again.
She pictures his lonely, unrewarding slog. “Now he takes his valises out of the car and puts them back and takes them out again and he’s exhausted… What goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent?” She delivers a paean to this family provider who can’t provide: “The man who never worked a day but for your benefit? When does he get the medal for that?” She reveals he’s trying to kill himself to gain them the life insurance.
Why is it so powerful?
There’s something inexorable about the ordinary tragedy of this common man. Here, Miller gives voice to the myriad conversations and recriminations that can take place between families at dark times – elevating them so they have a quality of lasting testament, but also speaking for those who never speak out. Linda could be writing Willy’s epitaph. The implicit accusation of it reaches into the audience; there’s a pricking of consciences, a stirring of shaming (and sobbing) regret, even a political raising of consciousness in the plea for cross-generational empathy and tolerance.
In performance
Most recently, Marianne Elliott (with Miranda Cromwell) delivered the goods in a revelatory fashion, reframing the action within a once-aspiring Africanamerican family (Young Vic and West End, 2019). Sharon D Clarke (Linda to Wendell Pierce’s Loman) filled her lines with strength and a sense of being undeceived about his personality flaws yet compassionate still – rising in anger on lines like “And you tell me he has no character?” A wave of sadness came sweeping across the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York in 2012 when
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s pallid, lumbering salesman was given that heartfelt (but life-hardened) encomium by Linda Emond’s Linda. In between, Harriet Walter at the RSC (2015) delivered those lines like a tired threnody, as if she were as exhausted and elegiac as her hubby (Antony Sher).
Why it matters now
America is riven by division and uncertainty, chill economic winds and a mounting disillusioned perception among men of a certain demographic that they’re more unappreciated and disposable than ever, with all the mental health consequences that entails. The resonance of Miller’s masterpiece today could hardly be more apparent in these days of virus and viciousness. After the play’s success, he bought a new convertible but also sponsored a rally calling for an end to segregation and discrimination. How much has changed; how little.