Linda Loman: Willy's loyal and loving wife.His first name, Willy, reflects this childlike aspect as well as sounding like the question "Will he?" His last name gives the feel of Willy's being a "low man", someone who will not succeed however, this popular interpretation of his last name was dismissed by Miller. Willy's age and degrading mental state has him appear childlike and reliant on others for support, coupled with his recurring flashbacks to various moments of his life. He vacillates between different eras of his life throughout the play, and re-imagines them as if they were real. He is 63 years old and unstable, insecure, and self-deluded. William "Willy" Loman: The titular salesman.It has been adapted for the cinema on ten occasions, including a 1951 version from an adaptation by screenwriter Stanley Roberts, starring Fredric March. Since its premiere, the play has been revived on Broadway four times, winning three Tony Awards for Best Revival. It is considered by some critics to be one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. It won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play. It explores the psychological chaos of the protagonist, and the capitalist society's impact on his life. The play contains a variety of themes, such as the American Dream, the anatomy of truth, and betrayal. It is a two-act tragedy set in 1940s New York told through a montage of memories, dreams, and arguments of the protagonist Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is disappointed with his life, and appears to be slipping into senility. The play premiered on Broadway in February 1949, running for 742 performances. His awareness that he can’t live up to his father’s dream that he will turn high school adulation into ever-increasing success provides the key journey of the play’s narrative, and McConville’s typically physical performance captures well Biff’s frustrations.Late 1940s Willy Loman's house New York City and Barnaby River Bostonĭeath of a Salesman is a 1949 stage play written by American playwright Arthur Miller. Josh McConville’s performance of Biff, older brother and a faded high school jock, is the other stand out. “Sexuality,” we are told, “is like a visible colour on him, or a scent that many people have discovered.” Thomson’s superb performance holds this heart of the play for us.Ĭallan Colley as the younger son, Hap Loman, does a great job of living up to another of Miller’s demanding stage directions. At the very least, his life is worth having a play written about it. So attention must be paid.” Linda’s claims are the claims of the play: that an ordinary man’s suffering is worth something beyond its dollar value. “He’s a human being”, she tells her sons, “and a terrible thing is happening to him. Linda Loman’s defiant defence of her husband, despite all his flaws, is the moral centre of the play. Thomson has found a pathos and a strength to the role that is not always realised in performance. Helen Thomson’s portrayal of Linda Loman, his wife, is the standout performance of the production. Helen Thompson gives the standout performance of this production. Sydney Theatre Company, 2021. So it is an unexpected pleasure of this production to have them foregrounded and made use of in this way. Perhaps unusually, the stage directions for Death of a Salesman are fascinating in their own right. But it is succinctly evocative of the terrible prison into which the Loman family have slowly drifted, a prison constructed out of ill-founded hopes and a cruelly competitive world. This elusive instruction from Miller is a tough brief for any set designer. The most telling sentence from Miller’s opening stage directions describes the house in which the Lomans live: “An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality”. This empty space is the screen against which the Loman family’s faded hopes of schoolboy success are projected, and where they have come to die. David Fleischer’s well-executed set design provides us with an enormous, echoing school assembly hall that is well past its sell-by date. This is an impactful decision, as it overlays the set with the dream-like visions of reality with which the play is so much concerned. She provides us with a narrator (Brigid Zengeni) who directly addresses the audience with a kind of “voiceover” derived from Miller’s wonderful original stage directions. Photo: Prudence Uptonĭirector Paige Rattray has made an interesting choice in the opening moments of Sydney Theatre Company’s new production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Actors Philip Quast and Brigid Zengeni in Sydney Theatre Company’s Death of a Salesman, 2021.
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