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Death of a Salesman, RX, Manchester 2018: Review by Pete Kalu

    Death of a Salesman Review by Pete Kalu (including a reflection on colour-blind casting)   I saw Arthur Miller’s theatre play, Death of a Salesman on 2 November 2018  at Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.  Most of the cast were black in this version, including the main character, Willy Loman. Don Warrington is superb as Willy Loman. If one of Loman’s attributes is charm, then Warrington exudes this effortlessly. Really. I’d buy any used car off the guy when Don-as-Willy goes into charm mode. Flickers of Warrington’s debonair Rising Damp sit-com persona, Philip, come into my mind as I watch the early scenes.  And this is what interested me, phenomenologically, about Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller once said the play was originally going to be called The Inside of his Head, and the play’s remarkable in the way it shuffles time and shows the presence of the past – of memory – in present, intense consciousness. Which brings me to myself as a black member of the audience, watching this colour-blind casting: what goes on inside my head while watching Don Warrington play Willy Loman? First, the utter brilliance of Don Warrington. He delivers that mash of charm and bewilderment, of flattering, deluded hope, rage, tenderness, machismo, inarticulate love, the whole kaboodle of aching contradictions that make up Willy Loman. It’s delivered with aplomb, fabulously assisted by a talented cast – it’s no easy gig playing in RX’s theatre-in-the-round, and the RX team made it work, and some. But back to inside my head and colour-blind casting. What knocks around my skull when I watch Don play Willy? First the ‘doubling’ of the action.  Here is a life lived as if racism did not occur in the America of the 50’s in which Death of a Salesman is set. It’s a huge what-if that smokes its way all through the performance, a form of alternative history or shadow play: what would it have been like if there had been no racism in America at the time?  Could a black man have been able to get Willy Loman’s job, and have a family life as saccharine, as idyllic (at least in memory) as Willy Loman remembers his? Running alongside this stream of thought throughout, is its reverse: the thought that this play could only have been written by a white man. Only a white man would not comment upon the effect of race on a man’s prospects.  I remember seeing Blues for Mr Charlie by James Baldwin in the same theatre. Baldwin would never have written Salesman. Which doesn’t make Salesman a lesser play. Not at all. But it brings to mind the meaning of white privilege: White Willy Loman could aspire to be the boss of the firm, whereas a black man knocking on that firm’s door would not even have got a foot on its lowest rung. And then mingling with these two cross-currents of thought comes the wider, existential tragedy at the deep end of the play. Willy Loman kills himself.  Even with the benefit of the privilege of being white in a racialised society like America at a time when whiteness was the assumed universal, Willy still found life unbearable. It invites us to think of the absurdity of life, whoever we are, wherever we are. What Albert Camus in L’Etranger called ‘the benign indifference of the universe’ smacks Willy Loman in the face. Smacks us all.  Remorseless, indifferent Time finishes us all off sooner or later. It’s this last point that makes the play talk to anyone, everyone. So much for the big thoughts. Sticking with the phenomenological approach, another less abstract yet still parallel stream of thought I experienced while watching the play runs: how much are they paying this genius of an actor? Fame and fortune are arbitrary. Don Warrington was unsurpassable as Philip in Rising Damp.  Here in Salesman, he shows that was no fluke. His talent endures. I have no idea if the man is loaded or broke – whether this gig he’s doing is a hobby or a financial necessity. Such is the life of an artist. Then a more social stream of thought runs through here somewhere too. It goes: there are relatively few black people in the audience – why? When I go into a theatre or any other large space, I always scan for how many black people are around. Very few tonight. Theatre has always been claimed by a discourse that separates high art from low art. The arts council of Britain was set up in 1946 to foster ‘theatre, music and painting’. The sociologist Bourdieu famously expounded on how class markers are expressed through ‘taste’;  knowledge of and attendance at the theatre is one of those markers.  It amused me that on the night I went to see Death of a Salesman, there was a large sign in the  theatre foyer, saying ‘Manchester Wine School’. You can’t get a better signifier of aspiring middle-classness than that! I laughed. Almost out loud.  A theatre across town called Contact, tackled the problem of theatre’s class-based, virtue-signalling  associations head-on by abolishing the word theatre from their title. It’s not Contact theatre they tell you, it’s Contact. All this is not to say I don’t like theatre or other forms of ‘high art’. I attended a ballet only last week (La Fille Mal Gardee at The Lowry since you ask). There...

Play Review: Hamlet, at The Lowry, Manchester, UK, Jan 2018, by Pete Kalu

This youthful, bleak, exuberant Hamlet is played with panache and at full tilt. The set design is two parts West African court, one part Basquiat. Live African master drummers bring a stormy atmosphere to proceedings at court. The cast is predominantly black. It’s a black Hamlet. I used to think it’s a bizarre play, Hamlet, because nothing much happens yet it somehow grips. Essentially a young man thinks of killing his step-father for three hours. Paapa Essiedu’s Hamlet does not so much illuminate the play as set fire to the stage, and makes transparent  that the play’s grip is all in its psychological narrative – the torment, rage and grief –  the hell Hamlet is trapped in. Imagine having to face your father’s killer every day, and he’s sleeping with your mum too – wrong on so many levels! Paapa Essiedu is a real star turn – I can’t believe he will not go on to be a king of stage and film and I felt privileged to see him perform on Wednesday at The Lowry. I’ll be able to look back and say, “I was there!”  I watched in awe. He seemed so supple in movement and in voice, so contemporary, alive, pacing, sauntering, sharing space with and yet on another plane to the other actors, the characters around him, as he is meant to be – it’s his play.  He’s a young Hamlet.  Essiedu’s vocal control and range, his informal, sinuous bodily flow, his sneering disdain, his juvenile jests – the timing he lands every time, his whiplash wit, his almost wilful beckoning of hot insanity to come take him – anything is better than the cold hell he is in – all feed into this whirl who works the stage like a man possessed, like some Orisha has descended upon him and is inhabiting him. Inspired and tortured. Blazing. Watching his youthful burn and torment, it struck me Hamlet is a play that speaks so well to the hot topic of mental health and young people. Enough about Hamlet.  The stage was blessed with many superb performances. Mimi Ndiweni’s Ophelia is a multi-faceted gem – solicitous with her father, endearing, tender even in her manoeuvrings around Hamlet. Her harrowing disintegration after the death of her father is painful to the max. Tanya Moodie’s Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, combines haughtiness and conniving with a surprising warmth. Clarence Smith’s Claudius, the murdering step-father is magnificent – his pragmatist, realpolitik reasoning simultaneously repellent and utterly convincing. The grave scene, done with a West African inflection, is rip-roaringly funny, testament to the impression I got that even the bit part actors such as the grave-diggers had serious acting...