Death of a Salesman;Theatre;First Night
Benedict Nightingale
18 May 2005
Death of a Salesman
Lyric, W1
****
In an interview before Monday's opening of Robert Falls's production of Death of a Salesman, Brian Dennehy said that he feared that the London critics were "sharpening their knives ready to cut my liver out". Well, I can assure him that even if we could reach that organ, tucked in as it is behind his impressive bulk, it's safe in our hands.
Speaking for myself, I have nothing but admiration for all his organs, starting with his mind and his heart. No wonder his Willy Loman, doomed salesman, won him a Tony award in New York. It is a memorable performance that builds slowly but achieves extraordinary highs. With our own Clare Higgins and Douglas Henshall (pictured, right, with Dennehy) giving him support, the result is a testament to the power and to the incisiveness of the play's author, the late Arthur Miller.
What a remarkable play it is, this portrait of a man slipping, sliding, plummeting out of his American dream into the American ashcan and, self-deceiver though he always has been, dimly aware of his fall. He has been sucked and suckered into a world where reality and realism always take second, third, fourth place to appearance and muddled promises of glory effortlessly achieved.
Big ads guarantee a good refrigerator; "personality", success in business; smiles and backslapping words, a lasting friendship. That is what Willy believes he has taught his sons.
The impression Dennehy gives is of an exhausted ox or, as tension rises, a bear tormented by dogs he cannot quite define, let alone see. His weight is in every sense a plus: you feel he is almost too heavy to stand or sit. He is too shattered even to bear his own weight.
There are errors. He ignores the stage direction requiring him to be "wildly enthused" when Henshall, playing his hapless son Biff, comes up with crazed ideas of success, but the subtleties and strengths far outmatch them. Watch Dennehy's big dreamy smile droop into a rictus of disappointment; and when he succumbs to baffled despair, swivelling this way and that in his confusion, the theatre buzzes.
Higgins, too, begins quietly as his wife Linda; but to see her face, not just puffy with the effort of tending this impossible man but looking as if she has gone two or three rounds in the ring with someone ten times her weight, is to see someone very close to the abyss -and before the end she is in it: desperate for Willy, furious at her neglectful sons.
When playing the young Biff, Henshall's boyishness seems forced and, given his bulging tummy, his athleticism as a quarterback seems implausible; but as the older Biff he excels, giving us a man who has looked in the mirror and found what Miller knew all too well: the pain of truth.