Death Of A Salesman
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
Fri 26 Mar
***
Their timing was spot on. A few days before this critic attended Death Of A Salesman, Obama passed his $940bn Health Care Reform bill, as a spellbound democratic party chanted “Yes we can”. The crew and cast could hardly have asked for a better example of the American spirit of unassailable optimism in the face of adversity.
It is of course financial failure that looms large over the failed salesman of Miller’s play, who values personality over ability, and struggles to comprehend the success of those around him while his own family flounders.
Everyman Theatre’s production adds nothing new to Miller’s ambivalent play about the American Dream, but it’s a fairly solid performance from the cast. Alex Wilson’s Willy Loman is brilliant. Full of brio and pride one minute, and fear and self-loathing the next, he nails the character’s ambivalence, and provides a harrowingly convincing portrait of Willy’s mental breakdown.
It’s unfortunate, then, that the New York dialect proves tricky for other members of the cast. A remarkable performance by Patricia Murphy (Linda) manages to mask some of the more dubious moments from Tom Barker (Happy). There’s no hiding Peter Gaskell (Charley), however, who fails to get any sort of hold on the dialect whatsoever, and he clearly knows it, as he fudges his way through his lines, sounding somewhere between Canada and Australia.
It’s a shame that the actors’ grasp of the dialect occasionally distracts from what is an otherwise impressive performance by Cardiff’s veteran amateur theatre company.