Death of a Salesman
Crown Theatre Perth
★★★★★
Linda (Alison Whyte) is all too aware of the decline of Willy (Anthony LaPaglia) as she placates and defends him.Credit: Brett Boardman
My eyebrows darted skywards when I learned Neil Armfield’s production of Arthur Miller’s mid-century classic about the dreams and delusions of a burnt-out Brooklyn travelling salesman would be playing not at The Maj or Regal, but a coin-toss from Perth’s gambling ground zero.
All I could think of was Anthony LaPaglia’s Willy Loman telling tall tales about life on the road and betting his future on his golden-boy former-athlete son Biff within earshot of punters playing the pokies and huddling around blackjack tables with dreams of hitting the jackpot. It felt too close for comfort.
But when the tears started to flow I realised Crown Theatre was the perfect venue for Miller’s heartbreaking, haunting dissection of the American dream; Death of Salesman is one of those rare works of art capable of both entrancing critics and touching the hearts of audiences who shy away from hoity-toity arts palaces.
Indeed, Crown punters should abandon the gaming tables for a night and see Death of a Salesman because Armfield’s production is an absolute knock-out, a stunningly well-acted family drama that bores so deeply into the trauma and tragedy of a family of battlers that it resonates beyond the social and political concerns of the 1950s into our own turbulent times.
Astutely, Armfield and his designer Dale Ferguson have reinforced the play’s universality and its dream-like narrative by stripping away the naturalistic setting we associate with the play and returning it to Miller’s original minimalist conception — he believed that the play unfolded “inside of Willy’s skull” — and setting the drama in front of and on the bleachers in Ebbet’s Field, a former Major League baseball stadium in Brooklyn and the site of a legendary football game played by Biff.
Instead of Willy’s wife Linda (Alison Whyte), sons Biff (Josh Helman) and Happy (Ben O’Toole) and the rest of the cast shuffling on and offstage as embattled Willy drifts back and forth in time, they retreat to the bleachers and bear witness to the unravelling of a man struggling to come to terms with his ordinariness – “I’m not a dime a dozen!” – and the failure of his once promising Adonis-like son.
“Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person,” exclaims Linda in one the play’s most famous speeches, and this is exactly what the cast do as they watch Willy returning from his last sales trip and facing not just redundancy, but the truth about Biff, who has come home after failing to make anything of himself.
Keeping the actors on stage all the time also reminds us Miller’s play is not just a tragedy of a little man who toiled his whole life only to be thrown on the scrapheap. It is about intergenerational trauma caused by Willy’s failures and the cold, hard reality of American capitalism.
Anthony LaPaglia stars in Death of a Salesman.Credit: Jeff Busby
While Death of a Salesman is ultimately centred on the relationship between Willy and Biff, whose broad shoulders carry the hopes of the Loman family, Armfield has amplified the relationship between Willy and his long-suffering wife, who knows her husband is deeply flawed but understands his torment.
“His name was never in the paper,” says Linda. “He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But 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.”
LaPaglia is rightly getting raves for his Willy — he finds the Loman sweet spot between dreaming and despair, grandstanding and physical and emotional collapse — but it’s to Whyte we must pay attention because she is breathtaking, a mix of hyper-sensitivity and steeliness that would be needed to prop up a doomed dreamer like Willy.
And she and LaPaglia gives us one of the most beautiful and believable married couples ever seen on a Perth stage, delivering dialogue with the force we expect of practiced theatre actors and relating to each other with the subtlety and understatement of skilled screen performers. It is a reminder that Death of a Salesman is not just the tragedy of an average man destined to be average but a wrenching study of a marriage.
And Armfield found the perfect Biff in Helman, a man-mountain whose failure to achieve is made that much more tragic and moving because of his size. When Biff finally declares to Willy that he’s nothing, the contrast between the promise of his physique and the reality of his non-achievement, it uncorked so many tears I thought I might have to leave the Crown by canoe.
While the four leads are so riveting it made me forget I was watching a play in an auditorium built for musicals and not drama — 2300 people watching a 75-year-old serious drama in a resort complex is hard to get your head around — the rest of the cast are uniformly splendid.
In the final moments, Linda says that after decades of toil she has finally paid off their home. It’s a line that will resonate with Perth audiences who will be working as long and hard as Willy to pay off their homes as our version of the American dream is crumbling during the current cost of living crisis.
Audiences will cry as much as I did during the Perth run of this sledgehammer of a play, but it might not just be for Willy. There is a little Loman in all of us.
Death of Salesman is on until August 29.
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