Death of Salesman, Birth of a Masterpiece

Was Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller’s masterpiece? As the play is revived in the West End, three months after the death of its author, we hear the views of this Tony award-winning production’s director as well as those of the late Miller himself.

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Robert Falls is artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre where this production of Death of a Salesman was originally presented in 1999 before transferring to Broadway and winning four Tony Awards, including Best Actor for Brian Dennehy, who now reprises his role as Willy Loman in London. Before his death in February (See News, 11 Feb 2005), Arthur Miller was personally involved in overseeing the production’s eventual re-creation in London, including the casting of Olivier Award winner Clare Higgins as Willy’s wife.

In addition to reviving Death of a Salesman, Falls worked with Miller on his final play, Finishing the Picture, a largely autobiographical work drawing on the last months of the playwright’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe on the film set of The Misfits. The play premiered at the Goodman Theatre in October 2004 (See The Goss, 21 Sep 2004).

‘We are fortunate that Arthur lived to 89 and was as productive as he was right up until the end. He left behind an extraordinary body of work, but Death of a Salesman is the play that he is – and should be – best known for. It was his masterpiece. In the same way that Hamlet or King Lear translates into every language and culture, Death of a Salesman is a play that’s produced every night, somewhere in the world.

‘It seems so specifically American, a cautionary tale about a capitalist society, but it has extraordinary universal appeal. In every culture, it has something to say about human beings, their work and their relationship to society – and even more profoundly, it has something to say about family, about fathers and sons, mothers, brothers. Everybody that sees this play recognises something in it from their own life. It’s been that way for over 50 years and it will continue to be so. Death of a Salesman is one of greatest plays ever written in the English language. There aren’t that many that will stand the test of time but this one will.’

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Later in his life, Arthur Miller himself attempted to come to terms with the lasting legacy of his masterpiece. The following is an edited excerpt of a preface he wrote to accompany the 50th anniversary edition of the Death of a Salesman playtext, published by Penguin Books.

‘A few words about the theatrical era that Death of a Salesman emerged from. The only theatre available to a playwright in the late Forties was Broadway, the most ruthlessly commercialised theatre in the world, with the off-Broadway evolution still a decade away. That theatre had one single audience, not two or three, as is the case today, catering to very different levels of age, culture, education, and intellectual sophistication. Its critics were more than likely to be ex-sports reporters or general journalists rather than scholars or specialists university-trained in criticism. So a play worked or it didn't, made them laugh or cry or left them bored.

‘Some of the initial readers of the Death of a Salesman script were not at all sure that the audience of 1949 was going to follow its manipulations of time. Josh Logan, a leading stage and film director of numerous hits, Mr Roberts and South Pacific among them, had greeted All My Sons two years earlier with great warmth, and invested a thousand dollars in Salesman, but when he read the script he apologetically withdrew five hundred. No audience, he felt, would follow the story, and no one would ever be sure whether Willy was imagining or really living through one or another scene in the play.

‘In the 1949 Broadway audience there was more to worry about than their following the story. In one of his letters, Eugene O'Neill had referred to that theatre as a "showshop," a crude place where a very uncultivated, materialistic public cut off from its own spirituality gathered for a laugh or a tear. Clifford Odets, with his first successes surely the most hotly acclaimed playwright in Broadway history, would also end in bitter alienation from the whole system of Broadway production. The problem, in a word, was seriousness. There wasn't very much of it in the audience, and it was resented when it threatened to appear on the stage.

‘So it seemed. But All My Sons had all but convinced me that if one totally integrated a play's conceptual life with its emotional one so that there was no perceptible dividing line between the two, such a play could reach such an audience. In short, the play had to move forward not by following a narrow, discreet line, but as a phalanx, all of its elements moving together simultaneously. There was no model I could adapt for this play, no past history for the kind of work I felt it could become.

What I had before me was the way the mind - at least my mind - actually worked. One asks a policeman for directions; as one listens, the hairs sticking out of his nose become important, reminding one of a father, brother, son with the same feature, and one's conflicts with him or one's friendship come to mind, and this all over a period of seconds while objectively taking note of how to get to where one wants to go. Initially based on an uncle of mine, Willy rapidly took over my imagination and became something that had never existed before, a salesman with his feet on the subway stairs and his head in the stars.

‘His language and that of the Loman family were liberative from any enslavement to "the way people speak." There are some people who simply don't speak the way people speak. The Lomans, like their models in life, are not content with who and what they are, but want to be other, wealthier, more cultivated perhaps, closer to power. "I've been remiss," Biff says to Linda about his neglect of his father, and there would be many who seized on this usage as proof of the playwright's tin ear or some inauthenticity in the play. But it is in Biff's mouth precisely because it is indeed an echo, a slightly misunderstood signal from above, from the more serious and cultivated part of society, a signal indicating that he is now to be taken with utmost seriousness, even remorseful of his past neglect.

‘"Be liked and you will never want" is also not quite from Brooklyn, but Willy needs aphoristic authority at this point, and again, there is an echo of a - for want of a better word - Victorian authority to back him up. These folk are the innocent receivers of what they imagine as a more elegant past, a time "finer" than theirs. As Jews light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity, they exist in a spot that probably most Americans feel they inhabit - on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at a well-lighted place.

‘As it turned out, this play seems to have shown that most of the world shares something similar to that condition. Having seen it in five or six countries, and directed it in China and Sweden, neither of whose languages I know, it was both mystifying and gratifying to note that people everywhere react pretty much the same in the same places of the play. And what they were thinking (in China) turned out to be more or less what they were thinking in New York or London or Paris, namely that being human - a father, mother, son – is something most of us fail at most of the time, and a little mercy is eminently in order, given the societies we live in, which purport to be stable and sound as mountains when, in fact, they are all trembling in a fast wind, blowing mindlessly around the earth.’

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Death of a Salesman opens on 16 May 2005 (previews from 10 May) at the West End’s Lyric Theatre, where it’s initially booking until 9 August.