More than 75 years after it was first performed, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman remains one of the great examinations of ambition, family and the destructive power of believing that success is always just around the corner. In this ambitious new production at Liverpool’s Everyman, director Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu finds another layer within Miller’s familiar story by placing the immigrant experience at its heart.
What Fynn-Aiduenu has done is find his own personal inspiration to inform the characters in the play. This gives him a thread to pick up, in reading the family as first and second generation immigrants, and he capitalises on the fact that both Brooklyn, where the play is set, and Liverpool, where it is being performed, have a long history of both African and Irish communities.
Willy Loman has spent his life chasing the American Dream. He has worked, travelled and convinced himself that being well liked is the route to prosperity. More importantly, he has passed that belief on to his sons, Biff and Happy. Now ageing, exhausted and increasingly unable to separate memory from reality, Willy is being forced to confront the possibility that the future he spent his life pursuing may never have existed in the first place.
Here Willy, played by Cyril Nri, is viewed through the experience of migration, while the family around him reflects the African and Irish communities that have helped shape both Brooklyn and Liverpool. It gives another dimension to the American Dream. For an immigrant, success can represent more than personal achievement: it can become proof that the sacrifices involved in leaving one country and building a life in another were worthwhile.
Nri carries that burden at the centre of the production. Willy is simultaneously salesman, husband, father and unreliable narrator of his own life, moving between the present and memories that become increasingly difficult to distinguish from it. His tragedy lies partly in the fact that he has spent so long selling an idea of himself that he can no longer admit the truth.
Laurence Ubong Williams as Biff and Kiren Kebaili-Dwyer as Happy represent two different consequences of their father’s influence. Happy continues to embrace much of Willy’s obsession with status and appearances, while Biff has begun to recognise the gulf between the family mythology and reality. Their relationship gives the production some of its most compelling moments because beneath the anger remains the uncomfortable fact that these men love one another.
His Irish-American wife Linda, played by Emma Cater, captures the mixture of exasperation and affection that she has for him with warm but weary realism, although her character is not explored in as much depth as in some other productions.
Meanwhile Tayo Aluko is splendidly shadowlike as the ghostly figure of Willy’s late brother Ben, while Joe Speare provides a strong sounding board for Willy as the friendly neighbour Charley.
Willy’s memories do not behave like conventional flashbacks; people and events from his past invade the present as his mind begins to fracture. Adelaide Banks’ mysterious presence as The Woman, Willy’s extramarital affair, accompanied by flute and African musical influences, adds another dimension to this shifting landscape of memory. Miller’s jumping between timelines and locations isn’t flagged clearly enough, so it’s hard to know who to trust. The uncertainty seems to reflect Willy’s mental state but makes it hard to stay focussed on the production.
The cultural reimagining works because it illuminates ideas that were already present in Miller’s play. Death of a Salesman has always asked what happens when a society convinces people that material success is evidence of personal worth. By adding migration and generational expectation to that equation, Fynn-Aiduenu makes Willy’s pursuit of success feel even more loaded.
There is a particularly effective connection with Liverpool too. This is a city built in no small part by generations of people arriving from elsewhere, establishing communities and attempting to create something better for their children. The American setting remains, but the questions surrounding identity, belonging and aspiration travel easily across the Atlantic.
At around three hours and fifteen minutes including an interval, this remains a substantial evening in the theatre. Fynn-Aiduenu does not attempt to turn the play into something artificially brisk, rather the production asks its audience to spend time inside Willy Loman’s increasingly unstable world. But this is necessary because Willy’s downfall isn’t caused by one disastrous decision. It is the accumulation of decades spent measuring himself against an idea of success he can never quite reach.
Georgia Wilmot’s set is clearly faithful to Miller’s original in its multiple levels, partially absent walls, and towering apartment blocks to the rear. The 1940s period look is oddly weakened by the appearance of a handful of anachronistic props, particularly a laptop.
The idea that if we work hard enough our children should have more than we did is a universal dream, not exclusive to America. So too is the risk of confusing wealth, popularity and professional achievement with happiness. More than seven decades after Willy Loman first packed his sample cases and went out on the road, his desperate need to believe that tomorrow will somehow be better remains painfully recognisable.
Death of a Salesman plays at Liverpool Everyman until 10th October and tickets are available here,
https://everymanplayhouse.com/event/death-of-a-salesman/
Reviewer: Adrian Cork Date: 25/09/2026
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