22 May 2005
The Sunday Times
Death of a Salesman. Lyric, W1 ****
Brian Dennehy's huge presence brings a brutish power to the tragedy of the little man in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, says Victoria Segal
For an actor playing the quint- essential little guy, Brian Dennehy is certainly a big man. With his Popeye chest and arms that should be squeezing spinach out of cans, he looks as if he could withstand the assault of a wrecking ball, never mind fortune's blows.
Yet, despite his impressive bulk, Dennehy knows that Willy Loman, Arthur Miller's tragic everyman hero, has been reduced to an insubstantial wisp of humanity. "You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away," he rages as Loman fights for his life at a company to which he has devoted decades, a company that just can't stand to have the old man around any more. Of all the moments of revelation in this monolithic production of Death of a Salesman, it is this line that shows how rampant Loman's self-delusion has become. Who preserves the peel, the husk, the indigestible remnants of anything? Who values the container over the contents? Dennehy imbues that line with a sense of hopelessly misguided entitlement, showing that no matter how much you build yourself up over the years, it is the work of seconds to knock you down again. This Loman might be the size of a mountain but, ultimately, he is just so much peel.
Originally staged at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 1998, Robert Falls's production of Miller's 1949 classic brilliantly captures the clash between reality and fantasy, the cruel gravity that can bring an ordinary man to his knees. Mark Wendland's rotating set is full of sliding panels and spinning rooms, a disorientating palimpsest of past and present.
Richard Woodbury's score of jazzy sidewalk screeching evokes a New York of fast- moving cars and firing horns, a world where lumbering beasts such as Loman must evolve or die out. He has allowed his misguided creed of personality and likeability to destroy his mind, and his sons have also been contaminated by his beliefs: Biff (Douglas Henshall) is the former high-school football hero turned waster, crushed by the mass of his father's dreams; Happy (Mark Bazeley) is a womanising weakling who knows he is the second-favourite child (in a flashback, he desperately hooks his father's arm around his neck), yet has willingly swallowed Willy's doctrine of entitlement. Home together for the first time in years, the boys are told by their mother, Linda (Clare Higgins), that their father is planning suicide, wrecked by a life on the road.
Dennehy is tremendous as Loman, his weighty arms constantly flying to his face, wiping his mouth as if he is trying to remind himself that he is still there. He gives in to reveries of almost idiot glee, imagining deals doomed from the start, his grin not so much playing around his face as sinking into it. Yet while there are moments where you feel embarrassed for Loman -his desperate bartering with his much younger boss, Howard; the way in which he is quick to stoop to pick up something Howard has dropped -it is hard to pity this man. The tenderness that others show him -his kindly, successful neighbour, Charley (the excellent How-ard Witt), the waiter flinching at his public collapse (Noah Lee Margetts) -might come from sadness, yet also from horror at seeing a fellow man brought so low. You could argue that he is trapped by debt and responsibility, or stunted by consumerism, but there is something in Dennehy's performance that is unsympathetic, unpleasantly violent, even brutish.
It is hard to feel the pity one has for an innocent victim or a dupe of the system. This Loman's fatal flaws are distinctly lower-case.
What is worse, however, than to destroy yourself and your family? Henshall is excellent as the ruined golden boy Biff, the former Adonis who has realised that force of personality is not enough to ensure success and fulfilment, while Higgins is weariness personified as Willy's wife -as worn as her orange housecoat, but with an inner strength that her husband, forever telling her to shut up, does not possess. Yet, despite the play's status, you cannot pretend that the relentless anguish does not become wearing, or that there are not times when you can feel how the play has dated. The whipped American cheese and "Simonized" cars are one thing, highlighting the post-war consumer miracle, an age of prosperity revving up in the background like a new Chrysler. But Miller's heightened pitch can seem relentless to modern ears, and Falls's florid dir-ection does little to keep it within bounds.
Still, as befits a production of the "great American tragedy" staged in the year of its writer's death, nothing here is small. Only at the end, when Biff confronts his father with the truth about his life, do you really see just how simple the individual components of the biggest tragedies are. The complex set has been stripped back, and all that remains is a kitchen table, a wife, a husband, some children -the basic elements of a domestic tragedy playing out the conflict of ages. As Linda says of Willy: "He's just a little boat looking for a harbour."
This production, however, knows how to make his story titanic.