Death of a Salesman

Gate Theatre

A man sets down his heavy cases with a weariness that could shatter his soul. There is no relief in his homecoming – he has been unable to leave.

The world has always loomed down over Willie Loman, but in Michael Pavelka's marvellously sinister set it actually seems to be snapping closed on him: the toppling façade of a Brooklyn brownstone and a sharply canted stage meet each other like the jaws of a trap. If it was ever possible to create a more startlingly fatalistic Death of a Salesman, this is it.

“A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man,” Willie Loman’s infinitely patient wife Linda (a nicely stern, sympathetic Deirdre Donnelly) tells his two grown sons, and playing the frazzled everyman in Arthur Miller’s 1949 tragedy, Harris Yulin often seems so beaten he could fall over. “I’m vital in New England,” he says, without an iota of vitality, his words threatening to become indistinct with enervation, while he convincingly maps a mind addled by stray thoughts and assailed by memories.

Miller’s formal daring was to make his play move with Willie’s disintegrating logic, slipping between the present and past, reality and delusion, and director David Esbjornson gives his stage a corresponding sliding feel. Scenes materialise around each other with purpose: when we first meet Willie’s sons, Garrett Lombard’s drifter Biff and Rory Nolan’s brilliantly self-centred womanising Happy, they all manoeuvre around each other, unseen, but it’s a subtle indicator that the sins of the father are visited on his sons.

The resonance and relevance of this Salesman is in knowing that we too are conspirators in his septic fantasy. Here the vast promise of capitalism is built on gossamer: “A man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked,” Willie marvels of his brother Ben, played as a taunting spectral figure by Stephen Brennan in an ivory suit. You hardly need to consider every bust bank or worthless loan to see how this bubble will burst. When John Kavanagh’s sobering Charley reminds us that the jails are full of fearless characters, Ben’s rejoinder – “And the stock exchange, friend!” – brings a dark contemporary chuckle.

Our collaborative cynicism allows this production its inexorable tragic momentum, where the devastation of a family strikes each poignant chord anew, yet somehow it also buffers its full emotional effect. A well-handled restaurant scene, in which Lombard finally tries to break the cycle of fables only to be drawn deeper into its quicksand, is heart- wrenching.

Yet Harris seems resigned to defeat from the beginning, downplaying the more moving ache of Willie’s resistance. This Salesman’s death feels like a done deal, but his tragedy is ours: he is a man overwhelmed by illusions in a world with none. Runs until September 25th