The play’s intellectual appeal lies in Miller’s refusal to portray his characters as two-dimensional his refusal to involve himself in a one-sided polemic attack on capital-ism. Absorbing to the end, the run time didn’t seem as long as the almost three hours that went by, including the interval. Winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1949, Death of a Salesman has to this day remained a classic. Rattray has captured the dehumanising wallop of capitalism for those on the bottom with an intensely satisfying production.
To waste too much time on pity for Willy, however, might blind the audience to Miller’s deeper point that there was – and is – something decaying behind the smile of America’s big industrial complex. Willy finally confirms his paternal adoration, or at least, he’s no loveless patriarch like, say, Succession’s Logan Roy, for whom life is a fight for a knife in the mud, especially between his children. The epiphany is too late in the piece, Willy having devoted a lifetime to contradictions about what he wants from his sons that Biff cannot reconcile. “Isn’t that remarkable?” realises Willy, “Biff, he loves me, he always loved me.” The play’s masculine folklore of the pioneering forefather, the sons vying for their father’s approval, the father allowing pride to get in the way of expressing filial love, still resonate too of course. Today, generations will never own property because their government has purposefully distorted the market, unless they withdraw funds for insanely huge housing deposits from the bank of mum and dad.
Willy and Linda bemoan that their appliances break down before they can pay them off, that the achievement of a mortgage being paid rings hollow when the house is emptied of children. The truth, of course, is that the growing disparity between rich and poor in the US, UK or Australia today marks Death of a Salesman with evergreen relevance. Photograph: Prudence Upton/Sydney Theatre Company Death of a Salesman’s masculine folklore of sons vying for their father’s approval still resonates.
0 kommentar(er)
