![]() Willy explodes without warning when his next-door neighbor, Charley (Trevor Cooper), asks him, “When you are you going to grow up, boy?” (That “boy” is one of the few interpolations in the script.) The same rhythms animate Pierce’s performance. Such moments are part of an inspired, continuing pattern in this production, wherein ugly truths flare up only to be extinguished. It is an apparition that comes and goes like lightning, and you may even wonder if your eyes deceived you. And we are vouchsafed a fleeting, unsettling image that explains why, of a white man with a rifle trained on the back of the music-playing father. Willy doesn’t talk much about his dad, except to say that he moved the family a lot. (It feels poetically appropriate that this apparition is portrayed by the show’s composer and musical director, Femi Temowo.) That father materializes briefly as a gentle, spectral frontiersman from an earlier age. ![]() And sometimes, though it unnerves him, Willy hears the wandering melody of the flute his father played (rendered here as a clarinet). The show begins (and, less judiciously, ends) with a gospel hymn promising blessed rest and relief. But there’s sweet music in Willy’s head, too. The idylls are punctuated by the discordant sounds of a tape rewinding at hyper-speed. When Willy summons idealized memories of earlier days with his family - centered on his sons, the adored, firstborn Biff and the younger, attention-starved Happy (Sope Dirisu and Natey Jones, both first-rate) - these visions take on the stylized artificiality of period advertisements or burlesque sketches, in which cherished watchwords of uplift are not merely spoken but sometimes sung. (Miller had at first thought of calling his play “The Inside of His Head.”) This production finds the desperate exertion in such denial, the paradoxical energy in the exhaustion of playing a losing game for too many seasons. ![]() “Salesman” has always been a study in cancerous denial, an interior portrait of a man long out of touch with who he is. More radically, her London-born, Broadway-bound revival of the 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical “Company” transformed the unhappily swinging single at its center from a man into a woman. Her Tony Award-winning interpretation of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” seen on Broadway in 2018, presented a New York at the height of the AIDS crisis as a land of endless night. She does so without altering the innate substance of such works, carefully achieving her alterations from within. It’s no wonder that this overcharged defense system is finally starting to short circuit.Įlliott is fast proving herself to be one of the great transformative alchemists of classic plays - shifting perspectives in ways that make us see the familiar with virgin eyes. The adrenaline that courses through Pierce’s performance never lets up, even - no especially - when Willy is recalling a supposedly happier, easier past. While he has absorbed and abides by the mythology and rules of the American dream of self-advancement, there’s a part of Willy that worries the odds are fatally stacked against him. But in this version, he has another, heavier handicap: Willy is a black man in a nation where white is the color of success. This is partly because Willy is 60, working in a Darwinian business that belongs to the young and the fit. And that is something he can never afford to do, not even with his unflinchingly supportive wife, Linda (the formidable Sharon D. And for a painful second, he registers how much it hurts him to straighten up again. When we first see him, newly returned to his Brooklyn home from an aborted road trip, he bends to put down the sample case he holds in each hand. This electrically alert and eager Willy nearly always stands ramrod tall in this production, which originated at the Young Vic Theater, though you sense it’s an effort. ![]() (It’s the posture immortalized in the book cover for the original script.) Portrayed by a splendid Wendell Pierce (“The Wire” and “Treme” on television), Willy lacks the stooped shoulders and slumped back with which he is traditionally associated. ![]() As Willy Loman, the title character of this epochal 1949 drama, lives out his last, despondent days, what has often felt like a plodding walk to the grave in previous incarnations becomes a propulsive - and compulsively watchable - dance of death. What’s most surprising about Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s beautiful revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” which I mercifully caught near the end of its West End run here at the Piccadilly Theater, is how vital it is. And he has seldom seemed more alive - or more doomed. LONDON - The tired old man has had an unexpected transfusion. ![]()
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