Revived Salesman has a touch of genius
this is a brutal night. the titular plot point thumps you in the gut when it finally happens, but it’s the slow emotional maiming of a family — over the course of three hours and ten minutes — that really leaves its mark.
Arthur Miller’s play is the essential work on lost and lonely men: an ageing, failing salesman refusing to face up to what an utter disappointment his unemployable, philandering, once-promising sons have become.
Writing this is distracting me from finally filling out my membership papers for the sharon D. Clarke Fan Club.
here, she plays Linda Loman: steely matriarch, emotional keystone and sensually warm wife. As with everything she’s in, she does it with eye-stealing charisma and a voice of rattling thunder.
You can almost feel her heart beating as she throws her arms around her husband’s shoulders or slaps a son around the face.
sope Dirisu, as the star-boyturned-letdown Biff, has a fierce, rumbling fury in him. it builds throughout the play, exploding in some terrifyingly good arguments.
Natey Jones — as the sidelined, slutty, boozy happy — is one great big cheer. his walk is bouncy and cocky, but there are devastating flickers of a young man totally adrift, of a smile struggling to stay on his face.
Wendell pierce (of the Wire fame), as the desperately ambitious father Willy Loman, is a terrific turn, but unfortunately the weakest of the bunch. pierce plays him as a fizzy ball of agitation, which suits
Loman’s nervous banter well, but detracts from his fury and utter despair. too often those moments, meant to be bleak, wind up feeling slightly cartoonish.
My other issue is the whole show — which i saw on Monday, two days before the theatre’s ceiling collapsed midway through a show — is crying out for a trim. its slow, winding tension can’t quite sustain itself for the 190 long minutes.
Director Marianne elliott’s genius stroke, though, is to make the Loman family AfricanAmerican. it injects fresh subtext into this familiar play, and makes the pain Willy endures at the hands of his young (white) boss all the more agonising.
i confess that revitalised classics are my weakness, and this brilliant but testing production is a fierce, powerful example.