Ten years later, it seems to be the task of Australian audiences to reaffirm Death of a Salesman’s topicality. Recently, two different professional revivals of the play have appeared on Australian stages. The first, directed by Paige Rattray, closed Sydney Theatre Company’s 2021 season to an acclaim that emphasised the continuing relevance of Miller’s writing more than anything. The second, from Hearth Theatre Company and presented at fortyfivedownstairs, seems circumscribed by the need to support a similar claim.

Director Christopher Tomkinson carves out a familiar shape – that of the theatrical classic ‘as potent today as it once was’. His production is attuned to post-Trump politics and pandemic-era upheavals. How easy it is to see the pressures faced by frontline workers during the pandemic play out in Death of a Salesman, where, to paraphrase Willy Loman, workers are eaten like oranges and thrown away like peels. Easier still to make his son Biff, who prefers to head west rather than work in an office, a poster child for the disenfranchised millennial. Certainly, the play’s universal appeal is as potent as ever, and both Tomkinson and Rattray are quick to capitalise on this fact. Yet it is in Tomkinson’s production that we see this appeal resonate with an Australian context.

Fortyfivedownstairs is a cavernous space that retains, almost paradoxically, the claustrophobic feeling of a crowded basement. With its high arched windows and exposed brick walls, it evokes an image that Rattray’s 2021 production had sought to create with a set of towering, dilapidated proscenium arches and bleached paint. Tomkinson’s set designer, Adrienne Chisholm, seems attuned to these natural advantages, choosing to open up the space to include a side alleyway that runs outside the theatre. Other choices – the decision to fill the space with empty boxes painted with beige streaks, or the abundant dead leaves – seem dramaturgically vague at best. These choices may have read well on the page: the empty boxes, like Willy Loman, a product sapped of purpose; the dead leaves a tired symbol for the degradation of his body. In practice, however, they confuse the symbols already embedded in Miller’s writing and, most notably, crowd a space that achieves naturally what productions like Rattray’s spend vast sums trying to replicate.

Throughout the production, actors often collide with the set. A bed, pushed forward by two ensemble members in trench coats, hits a chair pinned beneath it. The affair between Willy Loman (Paul English) and his secretary (Kim Denman) consequently occurs on a bed that moves comically on its four wheels in response to the actors, all the while scraping against a chair still stuck beneath it. Before the scene finishes, Loman will have kicked down a column of empty brown boxes to create an exit.

In his program notes, Tomkinson reveals his investment in Mike Alfred’s book, Different Every Night to inform the rehearsal process. Alfred’s rehearsal methodology does away with fixed blocking to allow the actors to act according to their character’s natural impulses. The choice to have ensemble members circle Willy like sharks during moments of distress might represent the effects of this approach at its worst. Yet, for every failure – an unwieldy bed or a toppled chair – there are successes.

The production’s staging often favours stillness. Linda (Margot Knight) and Willy spend most of their first scene in a strikingly simple tableau – standing side by side, embracing and subtly caressing each other. We rarely see anger and distress played overtly in this production, which chooses the restrained pathos of a slow embrace, or a hand resting on a shaking cheek over violent fights or shouting matches. Biff’s famous concluding monologue is mostly delivered sitting down by the family table. In moments like these the production capitalises on the intimacy fostered by the space. The sheer tones of a flute from composer Sophie Weston, or the repeated rasp of air passing through its reed, add a haunting resonance to such moments.

Margot Knight and Paul English as Linda and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (photograph by Ben Andrews)

Paul English’s Willy Loman is the perfect complement to such an atmosphere. English emphasises Loman’s fragility. His slim figure and notably slow movements downplay the threat of violence often read in Loman’s erraticism, in favour of a quietude that turns his self-destruction inward. Like his father, Charlie Cousin’s Biff resists the urge to overdramatise. Moments of high emotion seem similarly internalised, revealed at great cost to Biff. The result is a climax flooded with affecting vulnerability.

Among the ensemble, Tas Dimitrakakis’s Charley and Kim Denman’s The Woman are notable highlights. Dimitrakakis is charming as Charley. It can be tempting to oversell the comedy of his character to cut through the pathos of the play, but Dimitrakakis humanises the role to beautiful and heart-warming effect. Denman, despite the set’s hurdles, seizes each dramatic moment she is given. Hers is the best performance of The Woman I have seen.

It is impossible to separate this production from the ways in which it uses, and at times struggles against, the confines of the space at fortyfivedownstairs. In the end, such dialectic throws the doors open on the tragedy at the heart of Miller’s masterpiece. In November 2021, the valiant team at fortyfivedownstairs learned of a proposal to transform their surroundings into two office towers. The months of construction to come this year will inevitability impede rehearsals and productions, many of which, like Death of a Salesman, have already been delayed due to various lockdowns. In response, the theatre has said it will be closing in March.

There is an additional resonance, then, to the empty boxes used to delineate the rooms and doorways of the Loman house in this production, and the haunting flute that echoes through the space. In the corner, an exit door is open to the thin alleyway beside the theatre. Through it, the ambient sounds of cicadas, traffic, and the thirty-five-degree temperatures of a Melbourne heatwave enter the theatre. In a month or so, the door will be locked against the sounds of construction, and the space will be empty. There is a potency still to Arthur Miller’s Death of Salesman, whose outcry against an unjust world will be one of the last heard at fortyfivedownstairs.

Death of a Salesman (Hearth Theatre) is being performed at fortyfivedownstairs until 27 February 2022. Performance attended 6 February.

This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.