Artistic director Gregory Doran is in no doubt. Death of a Salesman is “the greatest American play of the 20th century”. This does not in itself make Arthur Miller’s 1949 drama a natural candidate for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but Doran has other arguments for staging it now. Miller’s treatment of difficult relations between parents and offspring echoes a theme of Henry IV and King Lear. Doran last year directed Antony Sher as Falstaff and will direct him next year as Lear. Now Sher is at his most meticulous and fiery as Willy Loman, the man who was garrotted by the American Dream.
If forced to the offence of ranking, I would not place Miller’s play higher than The Glass Menagerie or Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Its range of sympathies is narrower and more predictable and its speech less penetrating. Still, it’s tremendous. Because of its indictment of capitalism, because of its generosity towards the unglamorous, and because of the extraordinary imaginative structure that intertwines past and present. Miller thought of the episodes showing the early life of the Loman family not as flashbacks but as scenes living in Loman’s mind alongside his present experience. He spoke of past and present as coexisting in the manner of geological strata. You might also envisage them as twisting together like the double helix in a DNA model. I wish someone would.
It may be that Ivo van Hove’s revelatory staging of A View From the Bridge has temporarily derailed my view of traditional stagings of Miller’s plays. Van Hove’s stripped-back, soberly costumed production made no attempts at verisimilitude. Yet its plainness emphasised the intricacy and fervent exactness of the play’s psychology. Doran’s production is accomplished but less disturbing. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s design is faithful and evocative: woodwind jazz in the background; correspondent shoes on the fellows’ feet; iron stairways; tall apartment blocks with some lighted windows; translucent billboards that are irradiated to mark shifts in time. It is exact and external. As is the portrayal of the central figure.
Sher beetles across the stage, flushed and explosive. He has thickened his voice so that from the beginning it is sluggish with disappointment; he moves stiffly as if he were carrying too much weight. Cut off from everyone by his choleric carapace, he makes you realise exactly what it would be to confront Loman: what exasperation and protectiveness he might provoke. He does not make you feel what it would be like inside his skin.
There are graceful performances from Guy Paul and Joshua Richards, who give the roles of Loman’s brother and neighbour the gravity of mythic elder statesman. Alex Hassell and Sam Marks, obliged to bounce around both as adolescents and young adults, and adopting a rather declamatory style, have a harder time playing the two sons, each damaged by their father’s expectations and behaviour. The most subtle performance comes from Harriet Walter in the apparently thankless part of Mrs Loman. Sher does not give us much reason to credit her devotion, but Walter has a ramrod elegance and gentle dignity even as the blood drains from her face at a new humiliation. The play treats her casually as collateral damage to her husband’s tragedy, but she makes herself a heroine.
• At the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 2 May
