Last year at the end of the RSC’s Henry IV part 2, Falstaff crumbled into despair after his surrogate son Prince Hal (now King Henry V) saw him clearly and disowned him. This Arthur Miller revival reunites the principals of that production – director Gregory Doran, Antony Sher now playing Willy Loman and Alex Hassell as his son Biff – and climaxes with a similar yet opposite insight on Biff’s part. He indicts his father just as deeply as Hal did Falstaff, yet still reaffirms his love for Willy, whose subsequent suicide is in turn driven by an un-forlorn, deluded yet indomitable hope. He is resolved that his life assurance should buy Biff the future that his life itself never could.

Sher seems to be bringing out Willy’s terminal fatigue from the off, yet subsequent scenes in both the play’s present and its memory-passages show that this, what in other circumstances might be called stately pace is a sign of Willy’s temperament and illusions. Even when he gives way to fury, the speed seldom varies. This regularity comes to underscore the inexorability of the second half, as reality insists on playing its cards out one by one, daring Willy either to accept or deny them. He always chooses the latter. Hassell makes this almost as much Biff’s tragedy as his father’s, showing how he has inherited Willy’s bull-headed pride while Sam Marks as brother Happy got the blarney gene.

In other circumstances Harriet Walter’s terrific performance as Willy’s wife Linda would be the glue of the production: just as exhausted, much more clear-seeing and possessed of unquenchable loyalty. In this case, however, Sher maintains Willy as the viewpoint character, floating between present and past as Doran, set designer Stephen Brimson Lewis and lighting designer Tim Mitchell deploy trapdoors and gentle magnolia washes to transport us and assorted inhabitants between time-streams. It is executed with a gorgeous fluidity, even if it does not quite succeed in realising a proscenium-stage vision on the RST’s deep, pros-less thrust stage. This is a minor fault, however, in a production which eloquently makes the case for commemorating the centenary of Arthur Miller’s birth in a theatre whose raison d’être is Shakespeare.
  
Written for the Financial Times.