Salesman deserves a theatrical retirement

Soulpepper does well, but itโ€™s the material that is lacking

SOULPEPPER, ONE OF the finest theatre companies in Canada, has a thrilling upcoming season for 2011 and is wrapping up the present one with a dubious classic: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

The more I see this modern tragedy,the less I like it,no matter how great the production.

There are exceptions, of course: the late Al Waxman’s starring role as the nowiconic Willy Loman — the name a subtle but clever play on “Low man on the totem pole of society”— at Stratford a dozen years ago was devastatingly effective, but it was clearly Waxman’s compelling title performance that made it work; he was utterly brilliant and heartbreaking.

Watching the only occasionally powerful Albert Schultz–directed presentation in its final preview at Soulpepper in late October only strengthens my belief that Miller is inferior to such contemporaries as Tennessee Williams and David Mamet in the United States as well as Tom Stoppard in the U.K.

In many ways,the Soulpepper production is top-notch: the expressionistic set is stunning, echoing the inspired original Broadway set from 1949; the lighting, music and staging, superb. Joseph Ziegler, a talented director and quality actor, is a fine Willy; Nancy Palk (Ziegler’s actual wife), as Willy’s long-suffering spouse Linda, is very satisfying. But the evening is nearly stolen by Tim Campbell in the role of Happy and by Ari Cohen as Biff — the two mediocre, self-loathing sons of Willy and Linda.

Cohen wowed Toronto audiences in Clifford Odets’s vastly superior play Awake and Sing, at Soulpepper recently, and he embodies Biff in a way that has never been more perfect, and I’ve seen a dozen productions of Miller’s play.

But the play! As a play about memory, Salesman can be moving with the emotionally and spiritually exhausted Willy Loman throwing himself into the past and talking with his rich Uncle Ben and his more successful neighbours as the audience pieces together the false values of Willy and his two sons. (Stolen footballs laughed off, unstudied-for exams too easily forgiven and an obsessive need to believe that “being well liked”by others is more important to success in this world than hard work.)

This production, for all its frequent peaks of excellence, is a case in point for why Arthur Miller is no giant. Harold Clurman, the astute American critic and director, proclaimed Salesman “one of the outstanding plays in the repertory of the American theatre,” but the extraordinary Canadian theatre critic Nathan Cohen always insisted that society was not to blame for Loman’s troubles.

Toronto’s greatest theatre critic found Miller’s play to be guilty of giving “society and the audience a useful way out. It is criticism which pulls back before it becomes really dangerous.”That’s a flaw seen in too many North American plays, Canadian ones as well.

Soulpepper’s production of Death of a Salesman runs until Nov. 13 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Mill St., www.soulpepper.ca.

 

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