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DEATH OF SALESMAN-APRIL MASTER 27/4/05 3:44 pm Page 49 L YRIC THEATRE PROGRAMME DEATH OF SALESMAN-APRIL MASTER 27/4/05 3:44 pm Page 1 WELCOME APOLLO DUCHESS TO THE LYRIC THEATRE The Lyric is the oldest and second r BAR largest playhouse on Shaftesbury BALCONY GARRICK GIELGUD s Avenue and we are pleased to be s r BAR hosting this performance of UPPER CIRCLE Death of a Salesman. We hope that your evening will be an r BAR s CLOAKS KIOSK enjoyable and memorable one. ACCESS/WC If we can assist in any way please do j DRESS CIRCLE ; not hesitate to speak to a member of L E K A D J r BAR s C H B the front of house team or the HER MAJESTY’S LYRIC BOXES BOXES duty manager. BOX STALLS BOX M A The building plan on the left may help you to locate the various services available. ALISON HEYS NEW LONDON PALACE Theatre Manager Really Useful Theatres is the largest theatre owner in the West End, owning and managing 12 theatres. They contain 14,000 seats in buildings ranging from the London Palladium and Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to the Duchess Theatre, less than a quarter PALLADIUM THEATRE ROYAL the size of its big sisters. We currently operate the Apollo, Lyric and Gielgud DRURY LANE playhouses on Shaftesbury Avenue and the homes of The Woman In White, The Phantom of the Opera, Chicago (the Adelphi is jointly owned with Nederlander International Limited), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Producers. Broadway is often referred to as ‘the fabulous invalid’ and, if you were to believe the press, the West End is not far behind. Whether the show you are seeing today is sold out or not, the true picture is a rosy one. This most ADELPHI expensive and labour-intensive entertainment and art form was once again IN ASSOCIATION WITH NEDERLANDER INTERNATIONAL LIMITED supported last year by record attendances. We hope to welcome you back soon. ANDRÉ PTASZYNSKI To book any of these productions, call our box office, Chief Executive on: 0870 895 5589 Front cover illustration by Lucinda Rogers. Lucinda works on the spot using pen, ink and watercolour. 24 Hour Credit Card Hotline Her reportage-style drawings of architecture and people, particularly in London and New York, record both www.rutheatres.com familiar and unseen city scenes and often highlight areas and ways of life that are changing. Her extensive London’s best one stop theatre guide with illustration work includes drawing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s restaurant column in The Telegraph for four years. on-line booking DEATH OF SALESMAN-APRIL MASTER 27/4/05 3:44 pm Page 11 DELPHI PRODUCTIONS David Richenthal, President Anthony D. Marshall, Chairman Charlene Marshall, Executive Vice President present BRIAN DENNEHY CLARE HIGGINS in ARTHUR MILLER’S DEATH OF A SALESMAN also starring DOUGLAS HENSHALL MARK BAZELEY and HOWARD WITT JONATHAN ARIS SAMANTHA COUGHLAN ALLEN HAMILTON ELEANOR HOWELL VICTORIA LENNOX NOAH LEE MARGETTS ABIGAIL McKERN STEVE PICKERING Scenic Design Lighting Design Costume Design Original Music/Sound Design MARK MICHAEL BIRGIT RICHARD WENDLAND PHILIPPI RATTENBORG WISE WOODBURY Assistant Director Associate Designer Production Sound Engineer Fight Director EMMA ANDY JOHN TERRY STUART EDWARDS OWENS KING Dialect Coach Associate Producer Advertising/Marketing Promotions/Sponsorship JOAN WASHINGTON TOBY SIMKIN DEWYNTERS MILKTWOSUGARS Casting Technical Supervision Press Representative General Management JOYCE NETTLES CROSBIE MARLOW PETER THOMPSON COLE KITCHENN ASSOCIATES ASSOCIATES Directed by ROBERT FALLS A prior version of this production was presented by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago on September 28, 1998 Robert Falls, Artistic Director Roche Edward Schulfer, Executive Director Supported by Media Partner LYRIC THEATRE Shaftesbury Ave, London, W1 DEATH OF SALESMAN-APRIL MASTER 27/4/05 3:44 pm Page 12 SALESMAN AT FIFTY As far as I know, nobody has figured out time. Not chronological time, of course – that’s merely what the calendar tells – but real time, the kind that baffles the human mind when it confronts, as mine does now, the apparent number of months, weeks, and years that have elapsed since 1948, when I sat down to write a play about a salesman. I say ‘apparent’ because I cannot find a means of absorbing the idea of half a century rolling away beneath my feet. Half a century is a very long time, yet I must already have been grown up way back then, indeed I must have been a few years past 30, if my calculations are correct, and this fact I find indigestible. A few words about the theatrical era that Death of a Salesman emerged from. The only theatre available to a playwright in the late 40s was Broadway, the most ruthlessly commercialised theatre in the world, with the Off-Broadway revolution still a decade away. The theatre had one single audience, not two or three, as is the case today, catering to very different levels of age, culture, education and intellectual sophistication. Its critics were more than likely to be ex-sports reporters or general journalists rather than scholars or specialists university-trained in criticism. So a play worked or it didn’t, made them laugh or cry or left them bored. (It really isn’t all that different today except that the reasoning is perhaps more elevated.) That unified audience was the same for musicals, farces, O’Neill’s tragedies, or some imported British, French, or Middle European lament. Whatever its limitations, it was an audience that loved theatre, and many of its members thought theatregoing not quite a luxury but an absolute necessity for a civilized life. For playwriting, what I believe was important about that unified audience was that a writer with ambitions reaching beyond realistic, made-for-entertainment plays could not expect the support of a coterie of like-minded folk who would overlook his artistic lapses so long as his philosophical agenda tended to justify their own. That ARTHUR MILLER unified audience had come in from the rain to be entertained, and even instructed, if 1915 -2005 need be, provided the instruction was entertaining. But the writer had to keep in Arthur Morath, Miller © Inge reproduced with kind permission of Josef Ltd Weinberger DEATH OF SALESMAN-APRIL MASTER 27/4/05 3:44 pm Page 14 mind that his proofs, so to speak, had to be accessible both to the lawyers in the over a period of seconds while objectively taking note of how to get to where one audience and to the plumbers, to the doctors and the housewives, to the college wants to go. Initially based, as I explained in Timebends, my autobiography, on an students and the kids at the Saturday matinee. One result of this mix was the ideal, uncle of mine, Willy rapidly took over my imagination and became something that if not the frequent fulfillment, of a kind of play that would be complete rather than had never existed before, a salesman with his feet on the subway stairs and his head fragmentary, an emotional rather than an intellectual experience, a play basically of in the stars. heart with its ulterior moral gesture integrated with action rather than rhetoric. In fact, it was a Shakespearean ideal, a theatre for anyone with an understanding of His language and that of the Loman family were liberative from any enslavement to English and perhaps some common sense. ‘the way people speak’. There are some people who simply don’t speak the way people speak. The Lomans, like their models in life, are not content with who and Some of the initial readers of the Death of a Salesman script were not at all sure what they are, but want to be other, wealthier, more cultivated perhaps, closer to that the audience of 1949 was going to follow its manipulation of time, for one power. ‘I’ve been remiss,’ Biff says to Linda about his neglect of his father, and there thing. Josh Logan, a leading stage and film director of numerous hits, Mr Roberts would be many who seized on this usage as proof of the playwright’s tin ear or of and South Pacific among them, had greeted All My Sons two years earlier with great some inauthenticity in the play. But it is Biff’s mouth precisely because it is indeed warmth, and invested $1,000 in Salesman, but when he read the script he an echo, a slightly misunderstood signal from above, from the more serious and apologetically withdrew $500. No audience, he felt, would follow the story, and no cultivated part of society, a signal indicating that he is now to be taken with utmost one would ever be sure whether Willy was imagining or really living through one or seriousness, even remorseful of his past neglect. ‘Be liked and you will never want’ another scene in the play. Some 30 years later I would hear the same kind of is also not quite from Brooklyn, but Willy needs aphoristic authority at this point, and again, there is an echo of a – for want of a better word – Victorian authority to reaction from the theatre people in the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, where I had back him up. These folk are the innocent receivers of what they imagine as a more been invited to stage the play, which, in the view of many there, was not a play at elegant past, a time ‘finer’ than theirs. As Jews light-years away from religion or a all but a poem. It was only when they saw it played that its real dramatic nature community that might have fostered Jewish identity, they exist in a spot that came through.