Robert Falls' extraordinarily involving production of Death of a Salesman began life seven years ago in Chicago. It moved to New York in 1999, where it became de facto the 50th-anniversary Broadway staging of Arthur Miller's landmark play. The author's death earlier this year makes the current West End transfer (with some key English replacements in the cast) the first posthumous production in London.
It has risen to both these occasions with overwhelming artistic conviction. In the second half, it is hard to conceive how Falls and his team could have exerted a greater gut-wrenching power over the audience or eschewed, more scrupulously, any cheap, blackmailing effects.
Crucial to the production's success is the superb Brian Dennehy, whose burly proportions and startling emotional transparency bring out, even more painfully than usual, the archetypal qualities in Willy Loman, the salesman who loses his job after a lifetime with the same company and who resorts to suicide to secure an insurance pay-out for his family.
Unlike Dustin Hoffman and Warren Mitchell, who were both excellent in the role, Dennehy is a convivial bull of man, with an attractively broad Irish-American grin. You can see, in the flashbacks to younger times, how this figure could have glad-handed his way to the fantasy of success and of a wide, supportive network of friends. The production works on the principle that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
And so it proves. An exquisitely performed scene here with the embarrassed, but unbending, second-generation boss, is authentically excruciating as we see Dennehy's attempts at a bluffly joshing old-pals act give way, via more and more humiliating concessions, to self-destructive tantrums of righteous anger.
The production takes its cue from Miller's original title for this drama: 'Inside His Head'. So the staging, with its mobile scenery, its revolve, which subjectively banishes and lures back places and incidents, and its translucent walls, which permit unnerving juxtaposition, is a more Expressionist effort than is usually attempted to get into the haunted house of Willy's psychology. The soundscape, too, has an echoic, in-the-skull eeriness.
At the same time, paradoxically, you see the family members in all their ambivalent victimhood. Clare Higgins gives a terrific, piercingly unsentimentalised account of Willy's devoted wife, Linda, who, at visible cost to herself, is prepared to sacrifice even her sons to the need to bolster her husband's illusions. The strain and the clutching at straws are beautifully caught.
The sons themselves are contrasted with a shocking incisiveness by Mark Bazeley, who abrasively projects the philandering cynicism and dogged sentimentality about salesmanship (both unfortunate reactions to the father) of the younger boy, Happy, and by Douglas Henshall, whose excellent Biff wears himself down to a distraught, weepy shadow in the desperate effort to make his father see him for the failure that he, Willy, has ironically created.
Dennehy is devastating in these later scenes. He flinches and shields himself like a beaten child from Biff's verbal onslaught, only slowing relaxing into a paternal embrace. But then, just when you think he has made a breakthrough, he reverts to the deluded fanatical grin of denial and addiction to optimistic fantasy.
The sympathetic breadth of this production and of its performances " including lovely work from Howard Witt as the hero's gruffly humane friend Charley, a man who offers Willy a job and forgives him for not taking it, because 'no man only needs a little salary' " convinces you that the play is much more than an attack on capitalism. Like King Lear, it is about the terrible consequences of a loss of power " and that is a subject universally understood.