Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman opens with a travelling salesman coming home early because he could not keep the car on the road. Willy Loman is sixty-three, still working on commission, and has begun holding conversations with people who are not in the room.

Over two days the family tries and fails to say what all of them already know. Linda protects him. Biff, once the golden son, has come home with nothing and a memory of something he saw in a hotel room years ago. Happy keeps lying because lying is easier. Willy moves between the present and a past he has substantially rewritten, and the mortgage is nearly paid off, which turns out to matter a great deal.

Arthur Miller wrote the play in 1949. It won the Pulitzer Prize and has been staged more or less continuously since, partly because its subject refuses to date: a man who believed the terms he was offered and cannot account for why they did not hold. The movement between memory and present is built into the text rather than imposed on it.

It is a tragedy about an ordinary man, written when that was still an argument worth making, and its cruelty is domestic rather than grand. The play is hardest to watch when it is kindest — the scenes in which the family briefly believes things might work out — and it leaves no comfort in place at the end.

It suits audiences who want theatre that takes a life seriously and refuses to soften the ending. It works best live, where the shift from kitchen to memory happens in front of you with no cut to hide it.