Neil Armfield’s brilliant revival of Arthur Miller’s classic play DEATH OF A SALESMAN which played to full houses at Her Majesty’s theatre in Melbourne last year is coming up to play a five week season at Sydney’s Theatre Royal. Sydney Arts Guide sent through ten questions to one of Australia’s greatest ever theatre directors. Enjoy!
1. What drove you and the producers to put on this revival of ‘Death Of A Salesman’?
There was an available space in Melbourne’s wonderful Her Majesty’s Theatre which fitted nicely into a space in my schedule, and Salesman hadn’t been seen in Melbourne for 20 years.
2. For the production to be mounted, was it getting Anthony Lapaglia to play Willy Loman which was the clincher?
It’s a play you wouldn’t do unless you have a great Willy Loman, so when Anthony said he was keen, we were in business.
3. Were you surprised at the play’s success in Melbourne? I note that it was originally going only to be a Melbourne production.
It was an extremely satisfying success! It was a big theatre to fill and out of subscription and we sold over 40,000 tickets. It was the intensity of the reaction and the pleasure that Anthony found performing it that led the producers to look at dates at the Theatre Royal in Sydney.
4. Will you be bringing the same cast and creative team to the Sydney production? I have read some of the Melbourne reviews and they all describe how exceptional all the cast were, and the great work by the creative team.
We’re bringing the whole package up! Inevitably there are a couple of cast changes, but it will be even better now with the production having developed across its Melbourne season. And the key trio of Willy, Linda (Alison Whyte) and Biff (Josh Hellman) are ready and rearing to go.
5. Why do you think this Miller play resonates so much even for today’s audiences? Miller has written so many great plays – ‘Death Of A Salesman’, ‘View From A Bridge’, ‘The Crucible’ et al. What makes him such a compelling playwright?
His writing reaches so deeply into the contradictions at the heart of American culture and society. We watch as these contradictions tragically tear Willy Loman apart. In this age of false veneers and fake news and the agenda of lies trumpeted by Trump, when we see America so fatally divided, we can feel the wisdom and the warnings in Miller’s chronicle of post-war capitalism and the lies underpinning the American Dream. It’s as if the country is finally being brought to account and the play feels more meaningful now than ever.
6. You were the inaugural Artistic Director for Belvoir Street for many years. You have been the Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival for a number of years now. What have been some of the highlights of these tenures?
I worked at Belvoir across two decades and we forged an approach to theatre that strove to be playful, original, and deep. And that grew from an extraordinarily committed family of artists. From the early tour to Russia of The Diary of a Madman to our international success with Cloudstreet. The Shakespeares, especially our Hamlet, and Tempest stand out. And I was so proud of our energetic commitment to First Nations writers and theatre makers – Dallas Winmar, Jack Davis, John Harding, Jane Harrison, Julie Janson – at a time when the nation was just beginning to address the lies of terra nullius with the Mabo and Wik decisions of the High Court. These were the great stories of our country.
In Adelaide, Rachel Healy and I, as Artistic Directors, set ourselves the task across 7 festivals of restoring the primacy of Adelaide Festival nationally and internationally. We wanted it to be like we remembered it last century! There were many extraordinary highlights but personally, apart from individually shucking the 2 dozen oysters requested by Grace Jones’s show rider after her spectacular opening of the 2018 festival, my proudest moment was the opening of Watershed: the Death of Dr Duncan, the glorious oratorio that we commissioned from Joseph Twist with libretto by Alana Valentine and Christos Tsiolkas to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the drowning of the gay law lecturer Dr Duncan by officers, it is credibly alleged, of the SA Police Vice Squad, leading to gay law reform unique in the world. (It will be seen at Sydney Opera House across a weekend this June!)
7. I have a book at home that I am always about to read, a series of interview with the umbrella title ‘Don’t Tell Me, Show Me?’ Are you please able to explain/elaborate on this maxim/
The beauty of theatre lies in its power to transform us through our imaginative identification in character and story. Theatre engages our hearts and minds this way. If we feel we’re being told something that will ‘do us good’, on the other hand, we quickly disengage.
8. People often talk about how great the actors were in a production but they don’t often refer to the work of the creative team involved. How important do you think a good creative team is to a production? I know for me, in recent years, I have paid a lot more attention to the important role music plays in theatre and cinema productions. Do we have some really good theatre music composers in Australia at the moment?
The power of the space in which a story is enacted on stage, both visually and aurally, fundamentally shapes our experience. It creates the theatre. I’ve worked with set designer Dale Ferguson for decades and with legendary theatre and film composer Alan John since we were at Homebush Boys’ High School and Sydney Uni in the 70’s. Dale and I wanted to created a memory space where we would share in the dream happening inside Willy’s head. We also wanted to acknowledge the influence of the classical Greek amphitheatre that Miller visited in Sicily on his trip to Europe after WW2 and before he wrote Salesman. Miller wanted to create a theatre as profound, poetic and democratic as that of the ancient Greeks, and he returned to America and wrote his greatest plays. So Dale suggested the Ebbets Field grandstand – a kind of modern American amphitheatre -from which Willy’s memories would emerge. It allows us to engage with Miller’s play in a way that releases it from the naturalistic tradition that has attached itself to productions of this play across the 75 years of its life.
9. Some of Australia’s finest playwrights are getting close to retirement age. David Williamson is always saying that he has written his final play but..Louis Nowra isn’t as prolific as he used to be. Joanna Murray-Smith is still prolific at the moment. Have you kept an eye out for the young playwrights coming through? Any of these playwrights we should watch for?
It’s a very healthy ecology – too many to do them all justice but look at the great work coming from Suzi Miller, Nakkiah Lui, Tommy Murphy, David Finnigan, Shakthi Shakthidharan to bounce a few off the top of my head.
10. What is it about a great actor/actress that make them so compelling? Cate Blanchett, Helen Mirren, Geoffrey Rush, Merryl Streep, Anthony Hopkins, Anthony LaPaglia, what is it about them that you know when you see them you are going to get a great performance?
They all manage to carry both mystery and emotional generosity – an uncanny ability to allow us into their thoughts while withholding enough to keep us anticipating the next secret. They’re also all really smart. And with faces, eyes and bodies that somehow transmit meaning. And always capable of surprise.
With Andrew Henry as the producer, Neil Armfield’s production of Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN is playing the Sydney’s Theatre Royal between the 17th May and the 23rd June 2024.
https://www.theatreroyalsydney.com
