Death of a Salesman

(Written by Arthur Miller, 1949; Directed by Neil Armfield, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 2 October 2026)

We can’t resist quoting the reaction to this famous play by Noël Coward: “A celebration of mediocrity.” But is that not the point? A salesman is something like a gambler, zig-zagging twixt triumph and disaster, between reality and delusion, where the house wins in the end. This writer thinks of his father, who had to do sales – hated it – before finding his lot in life; of Elmer Gantry, who said it was no life at all, and Willy Loman, the least heroic hero of all time, to whom attention is not paid, who is liked but not well-liked, who still feels – kind of temporary about himself, and who “does not have a grip on the forces of life.” If you’re in need of cheering-up, don’t go see this.

Armfield is a director with real visual genius. He blithely ignores playwright Miller’s detailed instructions about the set and stages the whole tragedy about giant bleachers, upon which apex sits a battered coaches’ box with the rusting sign “Ebbets Field”, a sign of past glories. The stage is starkly lit and starkly dark in turn. Cast members not in particular scenes sit about the bleaches, waiting their cue, like a Greek chorus: this apparently odd flourish works, firstly because the play is so well-known, second, Salesman hearkens back to Greek tragedy, and third, these static characters serve as a mnemonic, both of what has been and what is to come.

The play gives actors the opportunity to go bananas, of course. Anthony LaPaglia was fine as the self-contradictory Willy, handling the declamatory style well and growing into the role – perhaps more angry than distraught; for this reviewer, Alison Whyte (Linda) was the standout, monumental and merciful in a thankless role that, paradoxically, ties the whole piece together. Josh Helman (Biff) and Ben O’Toole (Happy) were too much alike, and Happy had too much make-up (suggesting his essential phoniness, maybe?). You couldn’t fault the supporting cast.

The idea of the American dream remains potent and elusive. Miller’s play was, however, an important squawk, albeit by a pessimistic man of the left: “...there was the smell in the air of a new American Empire in the making, if only because, as I had witnessed, Europe was dying or dead, and I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer.”* This production remained faithful to that still salutary warning.

[*Arthur Miller, Timebends (1987), p. 184.]