'Bitch-Godess Success' at M/c Royal Exchange

review by Brian Bamford

Above, is the original cross, Viburnum x bodnantense, flowering at Kew earlier this week.
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BEFORE I went to review the play  'Death of a Salesman' at the Manchester Royal Exchange, I went to put out the rubbish bins in the backyard, and I was delighted to see the Viburnham Farreri in bloom with its pink and white clusters.  It is mid-Autumn and the fragrant shrub flowers at its best now.  It was Autumn when Arthur Miller began to work on :'The Death of a Salesman' (1949), and  Miller says:  'A morning in the spring.  And everything was starting to bud.  Beautiful weather.  Like this, except now it's fall.'

Before Miller began writing the play he constructed a cabin in which he wrote the play to be on his own.  He says it was an impulse to do a practical act before addressing the problems of a man who was impractical:  a salesman called Willy Loman who struggled to make a sale.  He's a salesman who in the first lines in the play tells his wife that 'It's all right.  I came back.'

Arthur Miller in an interview told John Lahr:  'It's a denial.  I mean, imagine a salesman being unable to get past Yonkers.  It's like the end of the world.'  

Yonkers is the fourth most populous city in the U.S. state of New York.

It's a play about human failure of someone confronted with an ideal 'the American Dream' which he somehow can't live up to.  Yet in his mind he deludes himself and he unsuccessfully tries to recruit others to share in his delusions. 

Here is a man who is deluded to some fixed ideas of what it means to be successful by become a different person from what he really is.  In this version of the play at the Royal Exchange he is presented as a black man Willy (Don Warrington) who is not only uneasy in his own skin but who is envious of Charley played by Tom Hodgkins, the white man, who offers him a position that could have saved him.

Here is a fixed body of cultural values which we could call the 'American Dream':  perhaps a false belief system of what the philosopher William James called 'our national disease' or the 'exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success'.

Sarah Churchwell writing in the programme for the play almost inevitably relates the play to the present day, and she writes:  'The deterioration of American ideals from meritocracy into selfish entitlement' and she adds, 'the damage such a loss of values presents to a society, is the real moral arc of Miller's play; if Willy Loman is an American everyman, then his tragedy is not that of one man, but of a nation he represents.'

Is Willy's problem one of 'Bad Faith', such as Sartre might have called it, or do we see it in the context of Marxist 'False Consciousness'?  Is the play about a state of one man's mind or about a reaching out to a social ideal?

The moral philosopher, Mary Midgley, who died only last week wrote:  'The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more.  The trouble is simply that they don’t love others enough.'

The trouble with Willy is that he's not at home in his own skin.  Miller told John Lahr he wanted to have Willy in the play, so 'We should literally see, or be conscious of, his mind working elsewhere, with other people.'   

With Sartre it was the idea of the wine waiter banging the glasses down on the table, while his mind is elsewhere or the woman having sex and imagining she's with someone else.  With Willy he's hearing his brother Ben's voice in his head going on about the gold and wealth in Alaska.  Or as Miller says:  'I think we all think on two, three or four different levels at the same time.'

Sarah Churchwell, the literary academic in the programme writes of the subtitle of the play as being 'Certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem'.  She claims the play condemns the 'superficial fetishization of objects and rationalization of selfishness and greed.'  The materialisn that leaves the American dream 'rotting from the inside out'.

Miller based Willy on a family friend, Manny Newman, but the director of this Royal Exchange play, Sarah Frankcom, has staged 'Salesman' around a black family with what could well be a cultural coconut - brown on the outside and white on the inside, in the central role.

Towards the end of the play Willy tells his brother Ben 'I'm worth more dead than alive!'

And in almost the final utterance of his wife, Linda Loman, ejaculates over his grave is 'I've just paid off the final payment on the mortgage!'

When I got home I checked to make sure the Viburnham Farreri was still in flower and still fragrant..

 Go see the play!

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