Salesman's spellbinding despair

No paterfamilias in modern America drama cuts a more desperate figure or incites a stronger sense of pity than Arthur Miller's hallucinating, suicidal salesman, Willie Loman, who puts his silly faith in the American dream and lives to see it turn nightmarish when sacked at 63.

Robert Falls's ponderously slow, poorly staged production, premiered in Chicago six years ago, fails to convince me Death Of A Salesman is quite the classic we all once thought it to be. It is too melodramatically loaded and sometimes psychologically trite. Yet what a racking, wrenching hold the play still takes upon an audience, thanks to Brian Dennehy's spellbinding take on the title role.

You could not miss the tell-tale sniffs and nose-blowings in the stalls as Willie wilts under the accusatory verbal blows of his failed, elder son, Douglas Henshall's Biff, a teenage sporting hero turned thief and full-time failure at 34.

Death Of A Salesman, a dream-like memory play, now seems less an attack on America's cult of materialism and more a compassionate view of a lower-class family living on illusions and eager to show hometruths the door.

Falls, who ignores the fact that Miller intended the Lomans to be Jewish, sets the play in a sombre, smokey void, with designer Mark Wendland's revolving stage-set over-cramping the action in tiny rooms or isolating them in open space. Willie is sacked in a small Edward Hopper-like office that absurdly has a bed just behind the door. The switches between time present and time remembered are clumsy.

Dennehy, having been showered with awards for his Loman on the American stage, TV and film, duly rises to the big theatrical challenge over here. He achieves high moments of almost King Lear-like fury, pain and humiliation.

His standing ovation may have been kick-started by emotionally committed Americans in the audience, yet how it spread. This is a slow-burn performance. In the first half Dennehy, a shambling, stooping hulk, betrays too few symptoms of Willie's mental or physical collapse. Then when Loman is sacked after three decades, when his pleas to stay on fall upon deaf, bored, business ears Dennehy turns on the power and electrifies.

His forced smile fades out. He seems to shrink and sag under the weight of his own despair. So authentic, so raw is his rage, his throttled shouts of defiance and his trembling desperation that it feels as if you are eavesdropping on real life. "Attention must be paid," cries Clare Higgins, beautifully affecting as his simple wife, Linda, but life looks the other way and only Howard Witt's superb incarnation of cool, neighbourly kindness bothers to help.

Willie, as Dennehy makes vividly apparent, is no greedy materialist. "We weren't brought up to grub for lucre," accuses Biff. Loman's failure has to do with his naive and sentimental belief in business and its executants.

There is too little honesty in his relations with the world, his wife and sons. I detect something psychologically glib in the idea that Biff 's discovery of his father with a prostitute has served to wreck the boy's life. Yet Henshall, who conspicuously lacks Biff 's sporting physique and some of his vulnerability, movingly charts the man's journey to angry selfawareness. His final anguished truth-telling not only shatters Loman but leaves you harrowed and drained.

Death Of A Salesman