That play? Never again!
Sunday, October 19th, 2008
Usually there are two reasons for avoiding a play in future. Either you have seen it too often already and don’t care about it any longer or you are fortunate enough to have been at a definite production. At some time in my theatregoing life I decided I wasn’t too keen on spending another evening with that contender for prime bore of post-second-world-war drama, Willy Loman. I found him half-way bearable only when an actor like Warren Mitchell at the National in 1979 didn’t shirk away from his nasty and self-righteous side. Unfortunately all too often actors either sentimentalize Loman or use the part to show how technically brilliant they play a miserable loser. This was demonstrated most blatantly by Dustin Hoffman in Völker Schlöndorff’s film version which did not let you forget for a second how a major movie star displayed his abundant craft. With the Hoffman approach you are not moved by Loman’s suicide but rather embarrassed by an actor who is moved by himself in the first place. Unfortunately this is rather common in the German theatre, because so few first-rate directors take on Death of a Salesman with the result that star-actors merely do star-turns. However, there was one exception I would never have thought possible with this old warhorse of a play. Sometimes a director’s working method appears so completely in tune with a text that it overcomes all your prejudices against it.
Jürgen Kruse’s approach is to project various levels of filmic, photographic and musical quotations and allusions over each other to form a highly complex collage. This can lead to an overload of signifiers if applied to, say, Euripides’s Medea and consequently appear merely self-indulgent. But one can hardly imagine a play more suited to Kruse’s method than Death of a Salesman about which Arthur Miller always stressed that it doesn’t use a flashback technique and that everything happens simultaneously in Willy Loman’s mind. Kruse accordingly a few years ago at the Bochum Schauspielhaus created a reverberating chamber of overlapping sounds and images. Only for the restaurant scene chairs and tables were brought on and off. Otherwise everything happened in or in front of the Loman house, with Howard for example simply carrying his tape recorder on a stand with him. At the left-hand side of the stage designed by Steffi Bruhn was a huge drawing of Uncle Sam lifting the roof of a suburban house. The Loman family looked pointedly at it when Ben referred to his and Willy’s father and again during the funeral. There Biff, played as a James Dean-like rebel without a cause, associated it with the wrong kind of dream from the start whilst Happy, a mephistophelian figure with a hoof for the final scene, vowed to fulfil his father’s ambitions here and now.
Kruse stuck rigorously to Miller’s descriptions but introduced additional details like two chopping blocks to the left and right of the stage emphasizing Willy’s harking back to pioneer days when manual work still counted as something. The same faithful approach applied to Kruse’s work on the text. He hardly cut, only left out filler words and rendered more direct a number of laborious constructions in Volker Schlöndorff and Florian Hopf’s translation. Only occasionally small insider gags like renaming a character once briefly referred to “Robert Zimmerman” or using unusual pronunciations became a bit much for the audience. Not many of them will have got that stressing the definite article in “You still with the old firm, Willy?” was meant to refer to the United States as a whole. All in all the director knew that plays like Death of a Salesman lose when streamlined too much textually. He was particularly strong at rhythmically structuring longer periods of stage time aided by an atmospherically dense soundtrack.
The songs and their lyrics always related to basic themes of the scenes they were used for. For instance Ben’s appearances got Fleetwood Mac’s Dust as a leitmotif, Willy’s meetings with The Woman the same band’s Caught in the Rain. In a filmic way Kruse created a veritable oasis of breathing space when Jürgen Rohe pensively walked from left to right and back for almost three minutes to the sound of Time by the Pozo-Seco Singers, before saying “Gotta break your neck to see a star in this yard.” Early on Willy waltzed with Linda to the Fred Astaire version of Dancing in the Dark, which was also used for the desperate hug developing into another kind of dance between him and Biff after their big showdown. Willy’s elaborate preparation for his final exit and last look into the mirror to make sure his outfit appeared dignified enough was accompanied by Dave Davies’s Death of a Clown without in any way deriding the character.
Rohe exuded an immense sense of tiredness and fragility, the actor suffering from cancer that already affected his vocal chords. Kruse is diametrically opposed to the tendency of some of his colleagues to belittle characters by turning them into objects of fun. Never just interested in individual petulance and sadness but looking for the tragic, he tries to make the plays he directs bigger. Arthur Miller could hardly have found a more fervent supporter of his claim that tragedy is possible for somebody like Willy Loman. The archaic dimension of conflicts for Kruse proves far more important than obvious social criticism and he avoids the temptation of looking for easy topical equivalents. So Howard in Bochum was not some kind of Bill Gates-like yuppie, but rendered perfectly understandable in his behaviour. An additional dimension was created for Bernard who seemed the weirdest character of them all with a strong hint of the Forrest Gump about him. Often an enigmatic presence, he over and over repeated the phrase “Waagrecht oder senkrecht?” (“Horizontally or vertically?”), expanded from his remark to Willy that it always mystified him why Biff squandered his chances. Life to him looked like a crossword puzzle whose main clues he believed to have filled in, albeit unfortunately with the wrong solutions.
In Bochum the only contemporary element came at the very end when after the resolutely unsentimental funeral scene the young generation danced to the Rolling Stones’ Starfucker and gave the impression that they would deal far more ruthlessly and summarily with their own economic losers. This was a cathartic release after a sometimes almost unbearably moving evening. Kruse directed one of the seminal Miller productions in Germany running as long as Jürgen Rohe had the physical stamina to play it. In the programme Kruse quoted an exchange from Neil Young’s live album Year of the Horse when the singer calmly counters a heckler’s complaint: “They all sound the same” with the answer: “It’s all one song.” In a way the Bochum Death of a Salesman was one long song, a blues requiem for Willy Loman and also for the actor playing him who appeared in a Kruse-production for the 25th and last time: “He’s dying, Biff.”
Jürgen Kruse’s career went into rapid decline after this production. It was as if he had found the one play most suited for him and before and after that merely foisted his method of directing on texts far less adaptable to it. His Arthur Miller in Bochum achieved that rare combination: It appealed to older subscribers normally not too keen on rock music in the theatre played at full volume as well as to teenagers who had already formed a long queue at the box office hoping for returns when I picked up my ticket. I did not in the least imagine that Death of a Salesman of all plays would provide an experience in the theatre lasting four hours and not being a minute too long. Needless to say that I’ll never go to another production of it now. However, the CD of the soundtrack obtained from the theatre is one of my cherished memorabilia.
