Death Of A Salesman

Gate Theatre, Dublin. Until Sep 29 7.30pm €15-€35 01-8744045 gatetheatre.ie

“The jails are full of fearless characters,” cautions Willie Loman’s neighbour when the fantasy of easily won riches begins to twist into amoral delirium. “And the stock exchange, friend!” comes a smiling rejoinder. These days we’d probably reverse those lines, so cynically aware that the creation of wealth and fortunes built on nothing can be as convincing and permanent as a con artist’s swindle.

The Gate’s production of Arthur Miller’s 1949 everyman tragedy is about the contagion of that fantasy in a small, bewildered American family. “Attention must finally be paid to such a person,” Linda Loman says of her husband, the exhausted fantasist played with a heavy soul by Harris Yulin. The theatre has rarely ignored Willie and his struggling sons, though, and director David Esbjornson seeks to renew our acquaintance with some theatrical surprises but an overall deference to the play. The most successful addition is a brilliantly sinister set (a Brooklyn brownstone in mid-collapse), while some considered performances bring new complexity to Miller’s characters.

Deirdre Donnelly makes an absorbing Linda, by turns compassionate and stern, but Rory Nolan’s Happy (pictured near right with Yulin and Gary Lombard) is a marvellous character study, the son who will inherit every sin of his father. The Gate production doesn’t shed any new light on a classic, but this kind of tragedy just sells itself.

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