Miller’s tale is given a new lease of life in this smart, thrilling revival
Death of a Salesman
Piccadilly Theatre ★★★★★
Marianne Elliott’s long, slow, sucker punch revival of Arthur Miller’s classic has already received a clutch of award nominations; the smart money says it will receive many more come the end of its West End run.
Its star turns are plentiful, after all: Wendell Pierce’s mesmerising fantasist Willy Loman; Sharon D Clarke as his achingly steadfast wife, Linda; Anna Fleischle’s expressionistic set, with its cubist brownstone geometry and moving door frames, chairs and windows. And then there is Elliott’s fugue-like production itself, co-directed with Miranda Cromwell which, by placing a black family at the centre of Miller’s dissection of the American Dream, gives new charge to the persecution complex that variously affects Willy and Biff, his lost and drifting, underachieving son.
So it sounds a bit churlish to suggest that the move from the Young Vic to the West End doesn’t sit entirely happily, with the serrated intimacy provided by the smaller Young Vic stage inevitably compromised in this larger venue. This transfer feels a tad sonically muted, too, by comparison: and I wonder if some audience members at the back of the auditorium might find themselves struggling to catch every word.
Still, the performances are wonderful, among the very best currently to be seen on stage. Pierce, always proudly decked out in a three-piece suit, plays Loman as a brutish, lumbering, wounded bear of a man. He’s a bit like one of those children who, when they don’t want to hear something, put their hands over their ears and sing “la la la” instead. He’s physically extraordinary – both a bit too small and a bit too large, a man always out of joint.
His blustering self-mythologising contrasts beautifully with Clarke, who brings new levels of strength and endurance to the underwritten Linda, forever balancing household bills against Willy’s catastrophically fluctuating income.
Casting a black family as the Lomans both does and doesn’t change the play. It gives a new edge to Willy and Biff ’s hyper-masculine need to be heard, to be counted, and to their gnawing knowledge that they are not, and probably never will be. Yet at the same time it provides the all too rare pleasure of simply watching four fabulous black actors, including newcomers Natey Jones as the flippant showman Happy, and Soap Dirisu, truly excellent as the self-loathing Biff, deliver a story of enduring universality.
Fleischle’s noirish set, strafed by coloured shafts of shadow, is a marvel, its sliding walls and furniture replicating the way Loman’s mind is slipping from its moorings. Under Elliott and Cromwell, it also becomes a haunted house of voices: scenes overlap, rewind and fast forward, as Willy tracks chaotically back and forth through a memory-scape of guilt and unrealised dreams, soundtracked by soft, keening jazz and blues.
This is a long evening that refuses to rush its way to its final, terrible denouement – Clarke at her husband’s funeral plaintively asking: “Why didn’t anyone come?” But is there a sadder line in theatre, or one more heartbreakingly delivered than it is here?
I don’t think so.