Theatre reviews: Death of a Salesman | Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of)

With an intense and poignant central performance from David Hayman, Andy Arnold’s impressive new production of Death of a Salesman spares the audience nothing, writes Joyce McMillan

Death Of A Salesman, Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★

Pride And Prejudice* (*Sort Of), Theatre Royal, Glasgow ★★★★

To tangle with the classics, in Scottish theatre, is to stir up a whole set of attitudes and expectations that often have very little to do with the text itself; and it can take a production with a formidable cutting edge to break through those barriers, and make the work live again, as an urgent and thrilling piece of theatre.

Andy Arnold’s impressive new production of Death Of A Salesman - which opened at the Pavilion Theatre over the weekend, before a UK tour - is a show poised just short of that kind of greatness. Arthur Miller’s great 1949 tragedy has the advantage of being an ordinary working man’s story, told in the familiar language of American popular culture; and Arnold’s production boasts an intense and poignant central performance from David Hayman, an actor so well loved that his first appearance on stage, as ageing salesman Willy Loman, wins a special round of applause.

David Hayman in Death of a Salesman | Contributed

This new staging of the play has other assets, too, including outstanding performances from Beth Marshall as Willy’s wife Linda, and Daniel Cahill as their troubled elder son Biff. Neil Haynes’s set is quietly atmospheric, haunted by the ghosts of the trees that once surrounded Willy’s little Brooklyn house; Niroshini Thambar’s score brilliantly echoes the sound of Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare For The Common Man.

And the play’s central theme, too - of the perversion of the American Dream into a series of lies and illusions about greatness and dominance, that revolve around a bullying and relentless idea of masculinity - could hardly be more timely, in the age of Donald Trump.

Yet somehow, the sheer pain and sorrow of Willy’s decline seems almost to overwhelm the show, as it wades through the series of hammer-blows that finally destroy him. Playing at a full three hours, it spares the audience nothing, but also fails to offer that vital organising connection to contemporary reality that transforms a sad story into a truly cathartic tragedy.

In that sense, it makes an interesting contrast to the current Tron production of A View From The Bridge, which places the play’s contemporary resonances front and centre; and both shows certainly offer a powerful reminder of the sheer dramatic courage and power behind Miller’s dramas of working-class life, even as the postwar settlement his generation helped build is shattered, before our eyes.

Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of) | Mihaela Bodlovic

Isobel McArthur’s legendary Pride And Prejudice* (*Sort Of), by contrast, is the kind of classic-based show that assumes from the outset that the story will need a complete and ruthless reimagining, to transform it into anything more than a period piece.

In creating her radical new karaoke version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the Tron Theatre, in 2018, McArthur therefore made it her mission not only to expose the full horror of the social and economic situation facing the five unmarried Bennett sisters in blistering modern language, and to punctuate the action with pop classics ranging from The Lady In Red to Young Hearts Run Free, but also - hilariously - to present the story from the point of view of the servant class that Austen almost entirely ignores.

The latest touring version of the show has much of the verve of the original Tron production, despite the ravages of the pandemic, and the culture-shock of West End success. The current cast features Naomi Preston Lowe as Lizzie Bennett, Rhianna McGreevy as Darcy and Mrs B, and Emma Rose Creanor, Christine Steel and Eleanor Kane in a vast rage of other roles; and together, they slam Miss Austen’s funniest novel into the face of a 21st century audience with a panache that both celebrates every detail of her genius, and makes it new, for our time.

Death of a Salesman is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 19-22 March; Pride And Prejudice* (*Sort Of) is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 22-26 April, and His Majesty’s, Aberdeen, 29 April-3 May.