★★★★★
Late in Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman empties soil from a white sack and spreads it into a mound. He wants to plant something because nothing will grow around his boxed-in Brooklyn home. On Dale Ferguson’s stark stage, the pile already resembles a grave.
The image gathers everything Neil Armfield’s production has spent three hours uncovering. Willy has spent his life planting ideas in his sons: be masculine, be popular, never look ordinary and never admit defeat. Biff and Happy are the literal seeds of his life. He has watered them with instructions, boasts and impossible expectations, then wondered why they have not grown into the men he ordered them to become.
Anthony LaPaglia enters huffing and puffing beneath the weight of his suitcases. His exhaustion initially appears muscular or cardiovascular rather than theatrical shorthand for despair. His body is failing before his mind can understand what is happening.
Willy has begun looking at the scenery beside the road. After decades of driving past it in pursuit of the next sale, he seems almost startled by its existence. The veil may be lifting just enough for him to glimpse a life beyond selling. He never manages to step into it.
LaPaglia’s performance refuses to make Willy lovable merely because he is suffering. His shirt comes untucked, his tie sits carelessly and his belly presses against his clothes. Dale Ferguson and Sophie Woodward’s costume design has stripped the salesman of the immaculate appearance upon which his trade depends. We can see the labour required to keep presenting Willy Loman to the world and the presentation is coming apart.
The costumes otherwise remain within restrained 1940s earth tones. They belong to people trying to appear respectable without possessing much spare money. Paula Arundell’s Woman is the glaring exception. Her scarlet dress burns against the muted family palette, making Willy’s infidelity visible before its circumstances are known.
Her laugh from the box above the bleachers is even more unsettling. It hangs over the action until Biff finally hears it in the Boston hotel room and discovers that his father’s moral authority is another sales pitch. His reprimands about the boys not helping Linda with the laundry seem like farce given his dirty laundry.
Willy does not appear to experience his stories as lies. Happy does. Ben O’Toole’s Happy manufactures a successful identity for his father, Biff, Miss Forsythe and himself, adjusting the product to suit the customer. Willy has completed the more difficult transaction: he has sold his mythology to himself.
Growing up without a father to model manhood, Willy absorbed a culture that told him success belonged to the charming, athletic and well connected. He might have stepped from the pages of Dale Carnegie, believing that winning friends mattered more than knowledge or discipline. His sons did have a model. They had Willy.
Ferguson replaces the Loman home with the grandstand of Ebbets Field, the site of Biff’s remembered football triumph. Armfield and Ferguson conceived it as a modern American amphitheatre, drawing upon the classical theatre that influenced Arthur Miller before he wrote the play. It turns the downfall of a travelling salesman into a public tragedy.
Unlike many Greek tragedies, Willy’s fall does not occur within a single terrible day. It has been approaching across a lifetime. The people from that life wait in shadow, enter his memories and return to their seats when he has finished with them. At times the characters point towards this gathering, as though Willy’s thoughts have become visible.
Yet they are not quite a conventional Greek chorus. Miss Forsythe sits among them long before Willy encounters her. Others resemble a society that watches families and assigns them a place in the hierarchy. The Greeks recognised fate; Willy’s America insists upon hard work. The play asks which belief is more honest and whether it is easier to remain amiable from the top of the heap.
Mark Saturno gives Howard the distracted pressure of a man with clients waiting and little time for an ageing employee’s life story. His tape recorder captures his family’s voices while he remains deaf to the human being opposite him. Howard claims the business cannot carry Willy yet has spent the equivalent of two weeks of Willy’s requested wage on the machine. He mentions his maid as casually as though everyone has one.
Howard may be constrained by the business, but he owns it. Willy has given the company decades and discovers that loyalty was never one of the products being sold. LaPaglia allows a dangerous optimism to return when Willy asks for an office position. When Howard refuses, he even offers to return to the road. His desperation produces pity; his pride immediately complicates it. He will accept humiliation from Howard but refuses Charley’s genuine offer of work.
Willy is capitalism’s casualty and one of its more zealous missionaries. He ridicules Bernard for lacking masculine charisma, enjoys Biff humiliating a teacher and teaches his sons that being well liked matters more than being useful.
James Smith’s Bernard disproves every lesson. He studies, remains loyal and becomes successful without broadcasting it. When asked about his trip, he quietly reveals that he is going to argue a case before the Supreme Court. No drum roll. No sales pitch. Charley and Bernard offer a more decent way through the system, not a way outside it.
Josh Helman’s Biff is the only Loman attempting to escape. He believes that speaking the truth will release his father, as though one honest conversation can end decades of self-deception. But Willy’s greatest sale has been to himself. He does not suddenly buy another reality because his son gives a persuasive speech.
Biff’s love of physical work initially appears liberating, yet it contains its own fantasy. He still runs from job to job and measures failure through his hourly rate. Willy’s status anxiety has taken root even in the son rejecting it. The difference is that Biff has tried enough lives to abandon the fantasy of a road not taken. In Boston, he saw his father’s myth split open and found no fruit beneath the peel.
Helman makes their final confrontation an act of rescue. Biff is not trying to destroy Willy. He wants both men released from the obligation to be magnificent. Willy watches his son collapse into his arms and converts even this plea into evidence of future greatness. Letting go of the delusion would mean annihilation.
Happy needs the delusion too. O’Toole makes his sexual boasting feel both compulsive and rehearsed. He recognises parts of his behaviour, including his affairs with attached women, but has no interest in stopping. He sees his father’s deterioration and desperately hopes Biff can repair it without cracking the family façade. At the funeral, he chooses to continue Willy’s dream. Biff is the apparent failure; Happy is the true heir.
Alison Whyte’s Linda occupies a harsher reality. She keeps the accounts and knows what Willy earns, borrows and owes. Her defence of him is therefore both loving and complicit.
Whyte suggests that Linda knows more than she permits herself to say. Her bitterness towards Happy’s womanising may carry displaced knowledge about Willy. Yet at the funeral she appears shocked that Willy’s fantasy of buyers travelling across the country has produced so few mourners.
Armfield lets memory seep into the present rather than announcing flashbacks. Bernard runs behind the grandstand calling about Biff’s failed mathematics exam before the memory takes form. Anthony Phelan’s Ben descends with his walking stick. The Woman undresses while another scene continues, preparing the betrayal Willy cannot keep buried.
At moments it takes time to determine whether Linda is speaking to Willy in the present, inhabiting his memory or interrupting another conversation inside his head. That uncertainty places us within his confusion.
Alan John’s music and the sound design by David Greasley and David Tonion supply occasional clues. A jaunty, almost cartoonish flute accompanies Willy playing football with his younger sons. This is his happiest world: the boys are captive buyers, young enough to swallow every claim whole.
Niklas Pajanti’s lighting keeps the waiting figures in partial darkness until memory or judgment calls them forward. With the actors already onstage and only two tables establishing most locations, transitions remain swift. The three-hour production sustains its momentum because Willy has no clean boundary between then and now.
The chorus disappears for the funeral. The absence empties the vast Festival Theatre. Willy wanted proof that he mattered and imagined a crowd would provide it. Instead, the watchers vanish at the moment he needs them most.
Linda stands alone beneath the light and says they are free. The house has finally been paid for, just when nobody remains to share it with her. Whyte is reduced first to an isolated figure and then a silhouette.
The line is usually read as freedom from debt. Here it sounds more desolate. In the land of the free, perhaps death is the only complete release from work, repayment and the expectations of people looking down from the stands.
Willy’s mound of soil has become his grave. He chose the wrong seeds, but the production does not pretend that everyone begins with the same soil or receives the same weather. LaPaglia went to America and achieved the success Willy pursued. Fate smiled upon one Adelaide-born dreamer and not the other. Dreaming is not the failure; confusing fortune with virtue is.
Work cannot promise immortality, popularity cannot establish worth and children cannot be cultivated according to a parent’s preferred design. Eventually, all the selling stops. We return to the same earth, dime a dozen. Death of a Salesman is a jungle. It’s also a rare diamond. You’ll walk out richer.
Death of a Salesman is presented by GWB Entertainment and Andrew Henry Presents. It runs to 4 October at the Festival Theatre Adelaide as the final leg on the national tour.
Tickets are available here.
Website: http://salesmanaustralia.com.au
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Photo credits: Jeff Busby
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