Death of a Salesman Review

Image Credit: Daniel Boud

Death of a Salesman - 5 out of 5 stars GWB Entertainment, Andrew Henry Presents, in association with Adelaide Festival Centre TICKETS: Death of a Salesman | Ticketek

Neil Armfield's Death of a Salesman demonstrates just how little Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play has aged. Written in 1949, its examination of success, failure and the pressure to believe that we are special feels remarkably contemporary. A two-act tragedy, this story is set in Brooklyn and told through a montage of memories, dreams, and arguments of the protagonist Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is despondent with his life and appears to be slipping into senility. The play addresses a variety of themes, such as the American Dream, the anatomy of truth, and infidelity.

Staged by GWB Entertainment and Andrew Henry Presents in association with Adelaide Festival Centre, Armfield's production captures the essence of Miller's play while pulling on its emotional relevance for a modern audience.

Anthony LaPaglia is brilliant as Willy Loman. From the moment he walks wearily onto the stage, you can feel the confusion and exhaustion beneath the surface. He captures every pang of regret and every lie Willy tells himself to make it through another day. Yet what makes the performance so effective is that Willy never feels like a caricature. There is something painfully recognisable in his need to believe that his life, and the lives of his sons, must amount to something more.

LaPaglia's Willy is surrounded by a family that has spent years trying to live with the expectations he has placed upon them. Alison Whyte's Linda is the woman keeping everything running – the finances, the house and the increasingly fractured relationships within the family – while quietly resigning herself to the fact that she cannot mend the relationship between Willy and Biff. 

Josh Helman and LaPaglia have an excellent chemistry, making the disappointment and frustration between father and son feel entirely genuine. When Biff finally tries to tell Willy that neither of them is anything special, Helman's emotional breakdown is heartbreaking. Biff is trying to make his father see that they are simply people trying to get by. Willy cannot accept it, because doing so would mean abandoning the fiction he has built his entire life around. 

Image Credit: Daniel Boud

Ben O'Toole's Happy provides another perspective on that same fiction. While Willy has spent so much of himself building Biff into the ideal son, Happy has been largely overlooked, despite being perhaps more like his father than he realises. O'Toole captures this through his voice and physicality, revealing a man still chasing the validation Willy has taught his sons to value.

Armfield's staging places the cast in the bleachers of Ebbets Field, with a commentary box at the centre. It is a deceptively simple design that puts sport and the pursuit of greatness at the heart of Willy's desires, particularly his relationship with Biff and the expectations he has placed upon his sons. Having the cast remain on stage throughout adds an element of voyeurism. As they watch the action from the stands, so do we, raising the uncomfortable question of just who Willy is trying to impress. Is this life really for himself and his family, or for the strangers he spends his life trying to impress – people who won't remember him when he's gone?

Initially, we aren't always sure whether we are watching the present or one of Willy's memories, just as Willy himself struggles to distinguish between the two. The staging and lighting gradually establish a visual language that guides the audience through his increasingly fractured perception of reality without spelling everything out. The simplicity of the design allows the performances and Miller's writing to remain at the centre. Alan John's compositions add another layer, elevating the emotional impact of the production without competing with Miller's words.

Armfield pulls on the emotional thread running through Miller's play – what happens when we realise that we are not as special as we have spent our lives believing, and how difficult it is to accept that being ordinary does not mean being a failure.

That idea lands particularly hard today. The belief that everyone can be great if they simply work hard enough remains deeply embedded in our culture, even as more and more people find themselves simply trying to get by.

Death of a Salesman stayed with me for the rest of the evening. Armfield has taken a timeless play about the stories we tell ourselves to survive and, with LaPaglia and an exceptional cast, made those stories feel uncomfortably familiar.

- Scott