Death of a Salesman
Lyric Theatre Spring-Summer 2005

What may be the greatest of American plays, and is surely the most American of great plays is revived in an admirable and well worth seeing, if ultimately less than perfect production.

Arthur Miller's play is one vision of the archetypal American, a little man who totally believes in the American dream of ready prosperity and success and who has lived a life of denial because he simply cannot imagine the possibility of failure.

It may have had a special resonance for the postwar generation who were facing an era of seemingly unlimited prosperity with secret trepidation. But it still works more than a half-century later as a moving reminder of how devastating - and, for some, impossible - it can be to come face-to-face with yourself.

Brian Dennehy, a familiar character actor from dozens of American films, has returned to the stage in recent years to take on some of the most daunting roles in the American repertoire. He first played Willy Loman in Chicago in 1998, taking the production to Broadway the next year. Now he and Chicago director Robert Falls come to London, with a predominantly British supporting cast.

In Chicago seven years ago Dennehy's performance was very powerful, capturing the desperation of a man weighted down by physical and psychological burdens, and simply unable to marshal the resources to face the play's traumas.  He has softened and mellowed the performance somewhat for this production, and not always to the play's benefit.

While individual moments are unbearably poignant, others seem oddly dispassionate. The opening scene, when this aging travelling salesman returns home exhausted, works; the scene in which his young boss fires him doesn't. His encounter with Bernard, the nerdy kid next door who has grown into a successful lawyer, is very moving; the restaurant scene with his sons somehow doesn't come alive.

Dennehy's biggest failing - and I hasten to say it doesn't spoil the play, but just keeps it from total success - is in conveying a sense of Willy's emotional arc, the process of his gradual falling to pieces as his resistance to the truth of his own irrelevance weakens. Dennehy shows us isolated moments in the process, not the whole journey.

And yet the fact that Willy's psychological and emotional journey does not totally dominate the play has surprising and enlightening positive effects, in bringing the secondary characters more into the light. Certainly Clare Higgins as Willy's long-suffering but unconditionally loving wife gives the finest performance in that role I've ever seen.

She gives her character and her scenes an absolute reality, and is virtually the only one on the stage who never slips into the trap of just reciting famous lines, even when she's speaking some of the most famous lines in all of American drama. Indeed, her 'Attention must be paid to such a man' speech is unquestionably the play's emotional high point.

As Biff, the son on whom Willy has poured all his dreams of success, and who comes at last to realize he not only can't achieve it but doesn't want it, Douglas Henshall triumphs over the single worst attempt at an American accent I have ever heard from a British actor (and that's saying a lot) to make his emotional journey clearer and ultimately more moving than Willy's.

By their final confrontation scene you will be so caught up in Biff's pain that you will hardly notice that he is making vowel sounds that have never come forth from any real human being.

Howard Witt gives solid support as the loving neighbour Charley, and Mark Bazeley does more than most have been able to with the badly-underwritten role of Willy's second son.

Special mention must be given to Mark Wendland's set design, a particularly ugly and impractical combination of a unit shell and multiple revolves that forces key scenes into clumsily and unrealistically cramped spaces and never gives a clear sense of the geography of the Loman home.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Death of a Salesman - Lyric 2005