Death of a Salesman at Liverpool Everyman – review

It’s the hope that kills you. Or so Arthur Miller tells us in his body of plays that show us men seduced and shattered by the illusion of the American Dream – few more so than the pitiful figure of Willy Loman in his 1948 tragedy, Death of a Salesman. Home sweet home, says the sign hanging in the kitchen of the Loman home. And it’s the first of many unfulfilled ideals we’ll see play out in Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s new revival.

Fynn-Aiduenu’s first encounter with the play was Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s production at the Young Vic in 2019. He follows the same route by exploring the African American experience, with a predominantly Black cast and references to Igbo culture, but without enough conviction to this central idea. There is a burst of ritual at the end, but a lack of purpose to the occasional Igbo-translated lines.

He ends up playing a game of reverse pass-the-parcel with Miller’s play, every other scene wrapping it in a new layer of ideas. A play about the failure of the American Dream is swamped by themes including the immigrant experience, capitalism, generational divides, neglect and identity. It exacerbates Miller’s busy structure and blurry chronology, featuring daydreams that swing from the present back to former happy times filled with life and promise.

Miller’s jumping between timelines and locations isn’t signposted clearly enough, so it’s hard to know who or what to trust. The disorientation might mirror Willy’s mental state, but makes it hard to stay anchored in the production.

It’s perhaps fortunate, then, that this is not Miller’s most subtle play (just look at Willy’s surname). Willy’s wife and sons commentate on the subtext, explicitly analysing each other’s behaviour and motivations for us. He is sharked by his wealthy brother Ben, who intermittently paces the perimeter with a trunk that opens to pour out sparkling light suggestive of the diamonds he found in the jungle. A masked flautist also floats around, symbolising Willy’s mistress, sometimes laughing mockingly as a manifestation of his paranoia about being liked and admired.

Cyril Nri is acutely vulnerable and flawed as Willy. Stooped and hunched with a wide, bow-legged gait, he becomes suitcase-shaped. He moves like a wind-up toy, jittery and flailing around the stage. When memories take hold of him, he beams and glistens like a gold coin. He trembles, sweats, flaps his arms and bobs about, visibly treading water and trying to keep himself afloat. But what this isn’t is an unravelling.

From the opening moment he collapses on the kitchen table and throws himself against the countertops, he is a clearly broken, defeated man. And his muttering and mumbling, that runs for the next three-plus hours, signals his tethered connection to the real world.

The house is designed by Georgia Wilmot as an in-between, semi-realised space; both cramped and hollow, it disintegrates around him with its invisible walls. Emma Cater is one-note severe as Willy’s wife Linda, so her “attention must be paid” speech feels minute rather than a thunderous centrepiece. But Laurence Ubong Williams’s Biff is a mighty, coiled and commanding presence, always trying to hold back a snarl as he speaks, naturally slugging lines.

The first half’s weightless, larky sitcom style gives way to an oddly dead atmosphere that lacks the air of a great tragedy. Rather than devastation, it veers at the end into uplifting redemption – leaving us on a hopeful note that might be what Willy wanted, but not Miller.