May 17, 2005
Theatre
Death of a Salesman
Benedict Nightingale
at the Lyric, W1
IN AN interview before last night’s opening of Robert Falls’s production
of Death of a Salesman, Brian Dennehy said that he feared that the London
critics were “sharpening their knives ready to cut my liver out”. Well, I
can assure him that even if we could reach that organ, tucked in as it is
behind his impressive bulk, we would not wish to harm it.
Speaking for myself, I have nothing but admiration for all his organs,
starting with his mind and his heart. No wonder his Willy Loman, doomed
salesman, won him a Tony award in New York. It is a memorable performance
that builds slowly but achieves extraordinary highs. With our own Claire
Higgins and Douglas Henshall giving him support, the result is a testament
to the power and to the incisiveness of the play’s author, the late Arthur
Miller.
What a remarkable play it is, this portrait of a man slipping, sliding,
plummeting out of his American dream into the American ashcan and, self-
deceiver though he always was, dimly aware of his fall. He is been sucked
and suckered into a world where reality and realism always take second,
third, fourth place to appearance and muddled promises of glory effortlessly
achieved.
Big ads guarantee a good refrigerator; “personality”, success in
business; smiles and backslapping words, a lasting friendship. That is what
Willy believes he has taught his sons.
The impression Dennehy gives is of an exhausted ox or, as tension rises,
a bear tormented by dogs he cannot quite define, let alone see. His weight
is in every sense a plus: you feel he is almost too heavy to stand or even
sit. He is too shattered to bear his own weight.
There are errors. He ignores the stage direction requiring him to be
“wildly enthused” when Henshall, playing his hapless, hopeless son Biff,
comes up with praised ideas of success, but the successes and subtleties far
outmatch them. Watch Dennehy’s big dreamy smile droop into a rictus of
disappointment; and when he succumbs to baffled despair, swivelling this way
and that in his confusion, the theatre rings.
Higgins, too, begins quietly as his wife Linda; but to see her face, not
just puffy with the effort of tending this impossible man but looking as if
she has gone two or three rounds in the ring with someone ten times her
weight, is to see someone very close to the abyss — and before the end she
is in it: desperate for Willy, furious at her neglectful sons.
When playing the young Biff, Henshall’s boyishness seems forced and,
given his tummy, his athleticism seems implausible; but as the older Biff he
excels, giving us a man who has looked in the mirror and found what Miller
knew all too well: a painful truth.
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