Abandoned buildings summon ghosts: those that echo from their past and those that still stalk the present. These two planes of existence, that seem to haunt places long-discarded by society – one of distant, faded memory; one of persisting trauma – are also essential to Arthur Miller’s most famous play. This is what makes David Fleischer’s dilapidated set for STC’s latest production such an apt frame for the story of Willy Loman – a man cruelly rejected by a world that no longer needs him, as his dreams of a time when he and his accomplishments mattered slowly decay.
Within the confines of a crumbling hall, a room that was once clearly grand and treasured but has now been left to rot, a group dressed in reclaimed clothes observes the oddly incongruous apparitions of the Lomans. The head of the family is vanishing into a twilight world of warped nostalgia, as his fractured psyche wrestles with a devastating truth: after decades of slavish devotion to the American dream, he has become the mark of a lifelong con.
A proud soldier of capitalism, Willy has travelled from his home in Brooklyn, up and down New England, making more powerful men richer, all in the pursuit of a perfect life. But what is perfection? To Loman, it seems to be owning the right fridge, having sons that are billboards for their parents’ greatness, and earning enough money to be the envy of smaller, lesser men. But the ultimate coin of Loman’s realm is not the almighty dollar, but rather respect and a legacy that will endure ad infinitum. Chasing this ambition at all costs isn’t just the norm, it’s holy writ. Failure to uphold this creed is a mortal sin to Loman. Little wonder then, that when his life and his sons’ lives play out in far bleaker beats than his aspirations demand, the stress and failure slowly obliterate him from the inside out.
There’s little mystery to the fate of Miller’s dying salesman. But even within a story that is not only foreshadowed so pointedly by its title, but is also one of the most performed works of the American canon, director Paige Rattray finds new life. While the set remains relatively static, Paul Jackson’s painterly lighting design acts as an emotional prism, translating the ebb and mania of Loman’s grasping, spiralling, hail-mary schemes into a dynamic exchange of colour and gloom. Clemence Williams’ carefully placed score helps to underpin the supernatural subtext of the eerie setting with its discordant winks to horror tropes.
Perhaps the most revelatory choice is in Rattray’s casting of Jacek Koman as Willy Loman. Of Polish birth, Koman suggests Loman’s is an immigrant story, a tale of someone not only climbing the ladder from a place of socio-economic disadvantage, but also as an outsider. Koman’s Loman has not only chased the American myth into the grave, but he has also seemingly rejected his own culture in the process, embracing the affected colloquialisms, tastes and apple-pie values of his adopted home, raising sons that are apparently scrubbed clean of their heritage.
Koman delivers a bold, relentlessly thrilling performance. It’s a wilder, more irascible Willy than most, but one that sets the tone for the entire production. Josh McConville as Willy’s son Biff reaches similar emotional peaks as he desperately searches for a destiny of his own under the rubble of his father’s expectations. Callan Colley is the perfect foil as Happy, who exists as a caricature of the American masculine ideal, oblivious to the irony of his own puddle-deep perceptions of his unravelling family. Helen Thomson as Willy’s wife Linda is the anchor of the show who seems burdened from the opening scene with a tragic prescience of what is to come. Her world-weary pleas for the three men in her life to recognise their shared humanity fall on deaf ears, and only at the end of play is she able to fully tap the well of pain that this failure has created.
The Miller estate is famously resistant to heavy-handed interpretations, but while there is plenty of invention in Rattray’s production, she remains deeply reverent of the text, almost to a fault. Miller’s stage directions are rich in layers of detail, but also extremely prescriptive about the sights and sounds that must be on stage. To still retain this important context, the stage directions are recited as a narration by Brigid Zengeni, which further adds to the otherworldliness of the supporting cast, who linger on the stage, impassively bearing witness to the disintegration of Willy and his family (although be warned, this additional material adds quite significantly to the running time, which clocked in at more than three-hours on opening night).
The sinister voyeurism of the ensemble also draws a telling thread to the relevance Miller’s 1940’s tragedy still holds today. Much like Willy's, ours is a world where appearance and recognition are commodities, where personal worth can be measured in double-taps and retweets. Our current culture of influencer supremacy, where online memes and viral fads can be kingmakers one day and kingdom-breakers the next, shares a startling synergy with Willy’s yearnings for conspicuous success. It seems Miller’s ghosts are more alive than ever.
Sydney Theatre Company's Death of a Salesman plays at the Roslyn Packer Theatre until December 22, 2021. Get your tickets here.