Helen Thomson’s portrayal of Linda Loman, his wife, is the standout performance of the production. Helen Thompson gives the standout performance of this production. Sydney Theatre Company, 2021. So it is an unexpected pleasure of this production to have them foregrounded and made use of in this way. Perhaps unusually, the stage directions for Death of a Salesman are fascinating in their own right. But it is succinctly evocative of the terrible prison into which the Loman family have slowly drifted, a prison constructed out of ill-founded hopes and a cruelly competitive world. This elusive instruction from Miller is a tough brief for any set designer. The most telling sentence from Miller’s opening stage directions describes the house in which the Lomans live: “An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality”. This empty space is the screen against which the Loman family’s faded hopes of schoolboy success are projected, and where they have come to die. David Fleischer’s well-executed set design provides us with an enormous, echoing school assembly hall that is well past its sell-by date. This is an impactful decision, as it overlays the set with the dream-like visions of reality with which the play is so much concerned. She provides us with a narrator (Brigid Zengeni) who directly addresses the audience with a kind of “voiceover” derived from Miller’s wonderful original stage directions. Photo: Prudence Uptonĭirector Paige Rattray has made an interesting choice in the opening moments of Sydney Theatre Company’s new production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Actors Philip Quast and Brigid Zengeni in Sydney Theatre Company’s Death of a Salesman, 2021.
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