To review Tiptoe Productions’ staging of Death of a Salesman, I must first contextualise my biases as a reviewer. By no means do I intend to offend – I believe that this performance was a promising first act for a newborn theatre company, and one which could quite easily be perfected. The cast and crew certainly had their moments of brilliance, but my experience as a spectator was perhaps skewed by the fact that hours of my life were spent rereading, highlighting, and mulling over the minutiae of this Arthur Miller play as a youthful A-level English student. With such overexposure to a play, one cannot help but form strong opinions on it.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is stunning. It is tense and excruciating, it is the final crumbling of an old salesman whose hallucinations swallow up his reality, an allegory for the despairing individual driven to insanity when the American Dream contorts into a Sisyphean nightmare. The drama is psychological: Miller’s working title for this play was ‘The Inside of his Head’, and his original concept was to have an enlarged skull on the stage with characters walking around inside it. It is significantly the tragedy of a ‘low man’ (although Miller’s pun on his tragic hero’s name, Willy Loman, was not intentional), of an ordinary mortal attempting to grasp at greatness and failing spectacularly.
I adore the precision of Arthur Miller’s stage directions; he always knows exactly how he wants his plays to look. A gloomy mist enveloped the stage when I walked into the Michael Pilch Studio, successfully giving it “an air of the dream”, as desired by Miller. His other stage directions were not so faithfully followed: there was no “angry glow of orange” and the Loman household was not surrounded by “towering, angular shapes”. While Miller’s instruction for the play’s set to be “partially transparent” is difficult to achieve, his lighting directions are not so fanciful, and the towering shapes (crucial to the overall sense of physical entrapment) could have been projected onto the backdrop. The Pilch, which is quite literally a stuffy black box, made up for this absence with its claustrophobic conditions, but the play’s counter-motif of natural imagery (a contrast to its urban barrenness) was under-emphasised.
The actors often played their parts marvellously. My personal favourite was Joe Rachman as Bernard, who was animated and expressive in his role as a nerdy, bullied schoolboy, his emotions ranging from indignation to true heartbreak upon witnessing his friend (Biff, Willy’s son) throw his life away. More than any other character, he reminded the spectators that they were watching a tragedy. He filled the stage with his presence and his pained gaze was particularly accentuated (by him taking off his glasses) in the scene where Bernard tells Willy that it was after Biff’s trip to Boston (where he learned that his father was having an affair) that everything started to go wrong for him.
The role of Willy Loman seems challenging: he must at once be broken, insignificant, and a delusionally proud salesman. Nate Wintraub executed the role powerfully in his quieter, more vulnerable moments, especially when Willy is overwhelmed with emotion upon the realisation that – “isn’t that remarkable” – his son likes him. His last scene was surreal, and several spectators seemed to gasp when he screamed a rushed goodbye to his offstage wife, “I gotta go, baby. Bye! Bye!”, before hurtling to his death (the play’s title is quite explicit about the salesman’s death, so surely this is not a spoiler). Nate amplifies his voice quite impressively, which was suitable, in my opinion, for his role as the ‘bad cop’ in The Pillowman, but I feel that there is a depth to Willy Loman’s mental breakdown which cannot always be conveyed by simply raising one’s voice. Besides, one could shout in many different ways, depending on whether they are expressing their rage, anguish, authority, madness… This production’s Willy Loman almost seemed a little too sane, and did not strike me as a man who wanted to die.
Miller’s characters are complicated. Linda, Willy’s wife, is both resigned and loving. Hope Healy’s Linda balanced these emotions well, holding herself at a weary distance from her husband while still looking after him with careful concern. Her words after Willy’s death – “Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry.” – were haunting, and were met with silence. Ollie Gillam played a bitter and brooding Biff, and Ezana Betru’s most convincing moment in his role as Happy was when he cried at his father’s funeral. The brothers seemed much more emotive and energetic when they played their younger selves in Willy’s hallucinations, whereas their performance of their adult selves seemed a little static. There was little movement in their first few scenes except the occasional puff on a cigarette, and in those moments I felt almost as though I was listening to an audiobook.
The ominous Uncle Ben (Tristan Hood) was the only character for whom being glued to the spot worked well, because he is a figment of Willy’s imagination, a recurring hallucination who ultimately prompts him to kill himself. Cameron Maiklem’s stage presence as Charley was natural and charismatic, often drawing laughter from the audience.
Towards the end of the play, the lighting choices were incredible. A beam of light targeted Willy at precisely the right angle to make his shadow large and dramatic, allowing him to appear as the mirage of a great man one last time. At some point, the light illuminated nothing but the gas pipe, an agonising reminder of Willy’s suicide attempts. This production features an original score by James Pearson, which is an important role given the attention Arthur Miller pays to music in his script. Multiple characters have recurring musical themes in the stage directions, and the symbolic flute reappears to conjure an arcadian longing. Pearson’s music was dramatic and often intense, but it didn’t seem to rise to “an unbearable scream”, as it is supposed to in Willy’s final scene.
While writing this review, I come to wonder about what makes a good reviewer. My crystallised expectations of how Miller’s characters should be portrayed are not necessarily appropriate; theatre is, after all, a collaborative art form. Characters are renewed by every actor who embodies them. That said, this production saw its finest moments when the cast and crew sprinkled this classic tragedy with their personal flair, and with a little more creative experimentation, their full potential could surely be unleashed.
