Fine cast, great acting, but I was... Unmoved by Salesman’s patter of tiny defeats
Death Of A Salesman (Young Vic, London) Verdict: Worn out by Miller’s ‘masterpiece’ ★★★✩✩
LONDON’S everinventive Young Vic seeks to breathe new life into Arthur Miller’s tragedy about the hollowness of the American Dream.
His play tells the story of a struggling white family in 1940s Brooklyn, but here the family has been boldly cast as African-American. Our hero Willy Loman is played by U.S. actor Wendell Pierce (from TV’s Suits and The Wire), and his wife Linda by our own Sharon D. Clarke.
But God help me, for all their good work, I still find this play irredeemably dour.
You could argue that Willy’s despair at being silently shut out after 35 years on the road as a salesman has become more urgent as an allegory of racism.
Yet however you spin the racial angle, Willy’s mental collapse as his dream of social mobility turns into a nightmare is a personal question before it is a social one.
Swimming in debt, shunned by his employer and riven with guilt over his failures as a father, he tries to talk his way out of his malaise with salesman’s spiels and his own father’s mantras.
The challenge for Pierce, as an actor, is to connect with Willy’s survival strategies and he certainly
paints a fascinating picture of a mind in freefall — confused, exasperating and irascible, but also joyful, sweet and garrulous.
The remarkable thing about Pierce is that he’s a big man who appears to shrink before our very eyes as he is repeatedly crushed in his attempts to get by.
Even so, there is something about his Loman that feels defeated from the start; and that for me made his journey that bit less moving.
In terms of the play itself, I find the way that every flicker of hope, no matter how small, is snuffed out, unbelievably wearying.
As Willy’s son Biff, Arinze Kene is paralysed with guilt at failing to find a career; and choked with anger at discovering his father’s trysts with prostitutes.
Martins Imhangbe as the other son (sardonically named Happy) is doomed to repeat his father’s sexual peccadilloes and copy his painfully cheerful front.
Only the mother sees through them; and Clarke turns her into a Mrs Motivator, demanding that her husband stick to his guns; and that her sons pander to his is ornate self-delusion.
It’s a solid rendition — but I still find Miller’s ‘masterpiece’ more to be endured than enjoyed.
NOR
does it help that Anna Fleischle’s set is a sort of tombstone-grey tundra, with furniture suspended mid-air as though floating in a vision of purgatory.
Fleishchle writes movingly in the programme about how she drew on memories of her own father’s suicide when working, and she does allow some colour in, in stylised flashbacks. And yet even these small moments of energy become emblems of loss.
Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s dispiriting production offers only small traces of vitality. These include Trevor Cooper as the pugnacious neighbour who first insults Willy and then offers him a job.
And the action is topped and tailed by a lovely gospel hymn written by Femi Temowo (who also appears as Willy’s jaunty dead father in a rakish white suit).
And yet . . . by the time the third hour came around, I began to lose the will to live. My appetite for despair was sated. I wanted out.
Still, no matter what I think. The play’s status as a modern classic seems unassailable. And here, again, we must genuflect before it.