Colour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to believe that an ordinary African-American chap living in Brooklyn in 1928 might have owned a Chevrolet, and that a black businessman in the 1940s would consider asking a friend for ten grand to purchase a ranch in Texas. Younger viewers may assume that US society has been racially integrated for nearly a century. Is that the right message?
Willy Loman, the duffer at the play’s core, is one of American drama’s least attractive heroes. A preachy, devious, boastful, fawning, angry, narcissistic misery guts, he’s professionally incompetent and morally bankrupt. His only friend, his wife, is an aproned halfwit who finds his presence intoxicating even though no one else can bear him. He cheats on her, of course, with a hooker who laughs like a walrus. Even his choice of sex workers is dodgy. Wendell Pierce plays Willy as a cuddly bumbler and his sweetness does much to detoxify the role. The magnificent Sharon D. Clarke does her best as the wife, Linda, which means beaming inscrutably while occasionally mending her tights.
The play’s first act is a tricky blend of memory speeches, spectral visitations and flashbacks to Willy’s days as a young dad which require his grown-up sons to play themselves as kids. Always painful to watch adult thesps larking about as nippers and here the clunkiness is accentuated by freeze-frame effects and loud CLICKS to indicate that family photos are being snapped. Co-directors Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell have laid on a wrist-slashingly gloomy set. Willy’s home looks like the Batcave or a gents’ urinal inside the Pyramids. A collection of henges and granite plinths serve as the walls and even the bedding in the Loman household.
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