You play by the rules, you work hard, you are ‘nice’ person: you are well-liked and amenable. So, why aren’t you what you’d define as a ‘success’? This is the question posed by Arthur Miller’s 69-year old play, a classic of American and indeed world theatre and currently performed as part of the Royal Exchange’s autumn season.
The play’s theme is as enduring as the capitalist system that gave rise to it (and the author had his own personal perspective, as the son of a prosperous manufacturer who was ruined by the Great Depression), so there can be no charge that this is a ‘topical revival’. And the non-naturalistic nature of the piece, which Miller describes as taking place inside the mind of its protagonist, is perfectly suited to director Sarah Frankcom’s ‘house style', in which props are eschewed (at one point a telephone conversation is delivered without benefit of a telephone) and the cast is present Greek-chorus style throughout most of the action, even when they are not physically involved in the scenes.
The play depicts the final forty-eight hours in the life of Willy Loman, a 63-year old salesman who has worked for the same firm all his life with little to show for it. He knows his best days are behind him, as does his ever-supportive wife Linda; and so his two sons, Biff and Happy who are similarly conflicted characters because they have failed to live up to their father’s ideals and are still struggling and directionless. Over the entire family looms the shadow of Willy’s successful older brother ‘Uncle’ Ben, who embodied the ruthless entrepreneurial spirit that Willy tried, but failed, to emulate - for, though dead, Ben remains a potent presence, with his mantra about entering ‘the jungle’ (ie, Africa) at seventeen and leaving it ‘ rich’ at twenty-one. Part of the problem is that Willy lacks ruthlessness - his reasonably successful early career was founded on being ‘well-liked’, the person his clients were always pleased to see, even if they didn’t always do business with him. He has brought his sons up to believe that ‘likeability’ is the prime attribute for success and they are as befuddled and confused as he is when they discovered it’s nothing of the kind. As he watches himself and his sons overtaken by others - the neighbourhood swat, the son of Willy’s boss who now controls his fate - Willy begins to wonder where and how he went wrong.
As Willy, Don Warrington has the stooped posture of a man running on the vapour fumes of hope, his voice full of the cadences of defeat and incipient despair yet still coltishly determined not to be a quitter until events finally overwhelm him. It is a compelling portrayal of defiant atomity, a little man to whom attention ‘must be paid’, but isn’t. Maureen Beattie, as his loyal and intuitive wife Linda makes much of a character that too often can come across as the play’s too obvious ‘moral centre’ and the sons Biff and Happy boast a superb pair of performances from Ashley Zhangazha and Buom Tihngang respectively, with Zhangazha particularly explosive in his final confrontation with his father in Act 2. Elsewhere in a strong cast, Trevor A. Toussaint is a suitably imposing Uncle Ben and Rupert Hill and Milton Tom Hodgkins make telling contributions in minor roles as Willy’s unsympathetic boss and Kindly neighbour.
Sarah Frankom’s production is not always ideally paced and I would have welcomed greater dynamic contrasts between scenes but overall this is an impressive achievement. Jack Knowles provides appropriately mottled lighting to Leslie Travers minimalist set.
Reviewer - Richard Ely
on - 16/10/18
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