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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...

Moonlight – Notes on the film

Notes on the film, Moonlight Last night I saw Moonlight. It played to an audience in city centre Manchester, UK. The 200 seater cinema was two thirds full, with an audience approx 80% white. • The film is noticeable for the complete absence of any white characters. This removes one of whiteness’s central tenets – that there must be a white point of view that the film viewer can watch from, and that this point of view should be the dominant one. Instead, paradoxically, the white viewer is forced to inhabit at various times through the film, a series of black points of view. Almost the entire universe of the film and all its attendant points of view, are black. • One of the inescapable effects of racism is that it hyper-masculinises the black male. (see article on this here : http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=537). Moonlight is a triptych: Tyrone, at three stages in life – child, adolescent, adult. By juxtaposing the vulnerable child Tyrone and the equally vulnerable adolescent Tyrone with the later adult Tyrone, the hyper-masculine presenting adult is rendered sympathetic to white eyes (as well as to black eyes – since black people arguably are as likely to be ensnared in this hyper-masculinity semiotic net as white). The erasure of personality – of any sense of there being in this black male body a unique, vulnerable human being – which is one of the effects of hyper-masculinity, is thwarted by the three-part narrative strategy. It’s brilliantly thought out and executed. The jump cuts in ages also give a ‘dreaming’ space in the film where the viewer can construct in their imagination the details of how one stage led to next. How the child became the adolescent, became the man. It’s a beautiful “telling by not telling”. • The film does not use an establishing shot at its beginning –no bird’s eye view of the district etc (for this method of visual storytelling see for eg Coming To America). Instead it brings the viewer in close quarters with the characters from the get-go. In doing so, it slews off all the sociological contextualising that can make our attention fade – we know that black urban deprivation story, it’s been done many times. Moonlight’s filmic style is closer to the stream-of-consciousness novel technique than the Dickensian storytelling style. There is something going on in Moonlight with the use of shallow depth-of-field that reinforces this. It’s not naturalism – the stereoscopic human eye mechanism generally pings back and forth in the depth of field to bring a deep awareness of surroundings as well as focal point. The Moonlight camera operates usually on a close focal point without much depth of field. This feels like it works on an emotional plane – this is what the characters feel – it shows what the characters would see with their heart. Remarkable also is the intense poetic framing of the shots and the exquisite colouring the film has undergone. You could hang almost every frame of this film in a gallery such is its visual poetry. I’d be interested to hear from big format film makers I know such as Gbenga Afolabi, Clive Hunte or Pavel Prokopic on what is going on technically with this camera work and colouring. They’d know much more than me! • It’s a cleverly positioned film in that the story can reach both white and black audiences while saying different things to these audiences – it has enough levels to do that. If they so wish, a white audience can say, oh this is a coming-of-age film about a black gay man. And that’s OK. The narrative allows that limited reading of the film. They don’t need ask the more difficult questions: what led to Tyrone’s mother and father being so incompetent/ absent parents, what caused the grinding poverty, how did it come about that drugs became a normal career choice in that neighbourhood: ie they can ignore the social context at will. The film permits it. Black audiences may contextualise the film more in their minds, may extrapolate much more. Audiences in African countries may see it as a gay film. There isn’t one ‘correct’ way to view it. • The acting out of inarticulacy is superb by all three Tyrone’s: their silences talk so much. The narrative flips from public to private individual (from public Tyrone to private Tyrone) is the heartbeat of the novel. In that oscillation, in the trauma of that constant, fraught voyage, is all the pain of the film. • Plot wise, the film is simply set up: it uses the ‘humiliate your character early to get the audience to bond with them’ device found in eg the plays of Ibsen. Who cannot root for a small, hugely neglected kid getting bullied mercilessly? • The gold tooth jewellery (grills, fronts, golds) works both on the symbolic and the pictorial/cinematic levels. Tyrone has to remove his tooth jewellery to eat. There are moments in the film when this jewellery is so brilliant, so beautifully framed that we go past its contemporary hustler ‘showiness’ meaning; and in those moments Tyrone’s shimmering smile in all its radiance becomes as beautiful as a Benin bronze; Tyrone seems to know this, at times he peeks from behind this beauty in all his engaging vulnerability. And you think, yes Tyrone is fucked up, and yet… his soul is as pure...