Death of a Salesman

No social drama coming out of America since Death of a Salesman has had quite its emotional impact.

On its New York première in 1949, it was hailed as the first great play to question the American consumer dream, and it remains a classic study of failure. Willy Loman, the sixty-year-old Brooklyn salesman who says ‘I still feel – kind of temporary about myself, has become an archetypal image of devouring insecurity, of the human capacity for self-deception and, through the drama of his family quarrels, of the ways in which the flaws of one generation are imprinted on the next.

Perhaps Miller’s most remarkable achievement is to have furnished his shifting and inarticulate hero with an unforgettably individual existence.

“The best-made as well as the most courageous and emotionally compelling play to come from America since the war” – Daily Telegraph