Death of a Salesman – **** (four stars)
Theatre Royal, York
With Wall Street in meltdown and a president-elect who seems to embody the American Dream, these are significant times to revive Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller in 1949, seeking to expose what he described in his autobiography as the “pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon”.
They are sentiments that echo strongly today, though the concept of a mortgage being paid in full seems a little quaint. Miller’s salesman hero, Willy Loman, complains that all hire-purchase items are timed to wear out as soon as you have paid for them, and Dawn Allsopp’s ingenious design is a vertiginous heap of consumer items, upon which George Costigan’s Willy looks like a lost mountaineer ascending a peak of perishable rubbish.
Costigan portrays Willy as a shambling fantasist who has been down on his luck for so long he can hardly remember what success feels like. It is a measure of his obsession with appearances that he fitted his house out with whichever items had the most impressive advertisements. Director Damian Cruden frames the action with a tobacco billboard that reads: “It’s Lucky to live in America”. Costigan’s performance is a reminder that it’s only lucky to live in America so long as you are lucky.
Yet the play is also full of characters who have managed to turn the system to their advantage. Loman’s failure is magnified by the fact that his friends and neighbours are doing so well. There’s commanding work from Jonathan Jaynes as Loman’s benevolent neighbour Charley, Kevin McGowan as the flamboyantly entrepreneurial Uncle Ben and Steven Kynman as the industrious Bernard, who grows up to become a Supreme Court lawyer while Willy’s sons waste away into womanising drifters.
Such emblems of success can make Death of a Salesman seem as much a celebration as a condemnation of every-man-for-himself economics. Miller revealed in his autobiography that, after the success of the first performance, he went out and treated himself to a new Studebaker convertible, which he lovingly describes as “the most beautiful American car at the time”. Miller was a fiercely eloquent critic of the American Dream, yet it’s worth remembering that he was living it as well.
