GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
THE impromptu Arthur Miller season of six of his plays performed in Britain since the start of the year culminates in this production, with an all-star cast led by Wendell Pierce of The Wire and Suits fame and directed by the multiaward-winning duo of Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell.
But for all that star power this Death of a Salesman falls a little short of its sales pitch.
Anna Fleischle’s brutalist concrete set is where the cracks begin to surface. Trapping the action in such austere confines makes it difficult to imagine the mid-1940s US East Coast where Willy Loman’s life unravels and with the costumes and props so clearly located in the period it’s an anomalous contrast difficult to ignore.
MARY CONWAY is spellbound by superb performances in Arthur Miller’s study of the social and personal stress brought about by Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht
MAYER WAKEFIELD is gripped by a production dives rapidly from champagne-quaffing slick to fraying motormouth
MARIA DUARTE recommends the ambitious portrait of an agricultural community confronted by the trauma of enclosure
MAYER WAKEFIELD relishes a witty and uplifting rallying cry for unity, which highlights the erasure of queer women



