Guy Willoughby
theatre
Is this the end or the beginning? How can we understand? John Betjeman’s lines hit home hard last week, as I watched the marvellous first performance in Cape Town of Death of a Salesman at once a gauntlet flung at the future and an elegy for a style of performance in fast retreat.
This production has already entered local theatre legend. While in rehearsal last year, after a successul debut at the Grahamstown Festival, the cash-strapped State Theatre Company (previously Pact) abruptly withdrew sponsorship for the show. Undaunted, director Bobby Heaney and cast decided to carry on, each becoming a shareholder in the project; the play become a smash hit in both Jo’burg and Pretoria. What exactly does Heaney’s succs de scandale prove? That audiences will still turn out for an expensive, serious, traditional production or that in this case they were simply rushing, like moist-eyed music-lovers at the last concert of yet another demising orchestra, to catch a final nostalgic peep at a dying artform?
Firstly, the production deserves its success. It is an outstanding, thoroughly inspired achievement from start to finish, a triumph of dramatic art that engages brain and heart in a towering display of technique welded to feeling the reason people like me first went to the theatre, and the reason we returned.
The wedding of Heaney and a cast of South Africa’s finest actors makes for a potent marriage: and Arthur Miller, like his plays, surprisingly still alive in 2001, would surely be moved and delighted by this passionate revival. Death of a Salesman, as is often said, is a seering indictment of the ferocious capitalist ethic of acquisition and consumption that can drive an obscure, dreamy man into a lifetime of sordid compromise and unhappiness, as he chases the illusory goals of wealth, status and popularity. (One of Willy Loman’s more pathetic desires is that he be “well liked” as well as successful.)
Bill Flynn, as the failed commercial traveller haunted by all the ruinous choices made in the past, gives a deeply moving performance, layered with the accumulated emotions of a full if exhausted life. Pathetically stumbling towards the abyss, his fantasies threadbare but intact, Flynn’s Willy Loman lacks nobility of feeling but radiates the power of illusion. It is Flynn’s finest performance off the comic stage. The supporting cast are splendid, although accents slip and slide a little. Dale Cutts is a silken, eerie presence as Willy’s “successful”, stone-hearted brother Ben; Martin le Maitre and Langley Kirkwood intricate foils, almost a comic duo in a muted key, as the dismal Loman sons Happy and Biff. Franz Dobrowsky in particular gives a touching, subtle rendition of Willy’s neighbour Charley, silent witness and quiet benefactor in Willy’s unfolding tragedy.
The evening belongs, however, to Michele Maxwell, as Loman’s long-suffering, endlessly adaptable and endlessly loyal wife, Linda. Her extraordinarily textured performance reminds us that Miller created here one of the finest female parts in 20th-century theatre, a study in fortitude, adroitness and ultimately love, that is simply devastating. Maxwell transforms Linda into a being strong as steel, and fragile as air: truly, a magical achievement.
Death of a Salesman is ultimately much more than a capitalist cautionary tale. In the felt, prosaic language of ordinary people, Miller argues compellingly that human destiny remains a self-taught, self-achievable thing, that our fate is always the result of the choices that we make in spite of circumstances.
If Willy’s tragedy is that he finally gives in to the forces that crush him, the play’s radicalism subsists in precisely this: we need not give in to despair, but can choose hope and change. In South Africa today, as we contemplate the crisis in the arts, there is much in this message to build on and applaud. Heaney and his cast and dramatic art at its best are triumphantly vindicated.
Death of a Salesman is on at the Baxter Theatre until March 3. Tickets available through Computicket, www.computicket.com