Tom McCamus, left, as Willy Loman and Lucy Peacock as Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman at the Avon Theatre.Photography by David Hou
- Title: Death of a Salesman
- Written by: Arthur Miller
- Performed by: Tom McCamus, Lucy Peacock, Joe Perry, Josh Johnston, Matthew Kabwe, Sean Arbuckle
- Director: Dean Gabourie
- Company: Stratford Festival
- Venue: Avon Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: Runs until Oct. 24
So far this year, the Stratford Festival has injected its plays with a surprising amount of music – and not just in its Donna Feore-directed musicals. Antoni Cimolino’s The Tempest frames its shipwrecked proceedings with piano-driven songs; Graham Abbey’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream conjures the soundscape of an enchanted forest with a viola-playing First Fairy and violin-toting Nightingale.
But it’s in director Dean Gabourie’s Death of a Salesman where instrumental music takes on the most meaning in the season. (At least so far.) As written, Arthur Miller’s most famous play – a legendary treatise on the futility of the American dream – opens with a flute melody. But in the Avon Theatre, Gabourie replaces the woodwind with a muted trumpet, played mournfully in short interludes throughout the production by Michael Louis Johnson.
Sometimes, the actor-musician plays Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies. Sometimes, he plays a version of Taps – a dirge for the not-yet-deceased. Trumpet in hand, he presides over Salesman like a judge with a gavel, watching the events of the play unfold with a sad sort of certainty about how the Loman family will end up.
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The trumpet is perhaps Gabourie’s strongest directorial intervention in an otherwise straightforward Salesman, which, as ever, follows travelling businessman Willy Loman through his final weeks of life, haunted by an underachieving past and tormented by an aging mind. His family doesn’t understand; his colleagues don’t care, trapped in capitalistic hamster wheels of their own. The play is horribly, achingly sad, a classic that speaks to the timeless terror of getting old.
Casting-wise, the production is spot-on. Tom McCamus offers an unsurprisingly potent Willy Loman, crazed and heartbroken in equal measure, utterly different from last year’s Macbeth or 2024’s Arthur in Salesman in China. Joe Perry and Josh Johnston, meanwhile, play Willy’s sons, Biff and Happy, with a keen understanding of the boys’ imminent downfall at the hands of American exceptionalism. Lucy Peacock is Lucy Peacock: The Stratford regular’s take on Willy’s frenetic housewife, Linda, is angular and charged, and exactly what festival audiences ought to expect from the actor in a role as formidable as this one.
McCamus, left, and Peacock in a scene from Dean Gabourie’s three-hour show.
The result is a perfectly serviceable Salesman – but one that could have used more decisive direction from Gabourie, whose spare production is steered almost entirely by the actors. Most of the time, that’s a good thing: McCamus is a natural Willy, oscillating between lucidity and bedlam at barely a moment’s notice. His gravelly voice, so maddeningly amplified in Macbeth, carries easily throughout the opulent Avon Theatre.
But Gabourie’s production, which clocks in at a long three hours, sags in its transitions. Scott Penner’s elegant set, which suggests an intimidating fortress of tenement exteriors, is badly underused. Most of the action takes place around a white kitchen table, which later transforms into an office desk, then a dining surface at a fancy restaurant. Why do we need full scenic changeovers for the table to become a table? (While Miller’s script is on the long side, it can be condensed in its staging: The version running on Broadway, for instance, shaves an invaluable 10 minutes off its runtime.)
David W. Keeley, left, as Uncle Ben with McCamus's Willy Loman. Most of the show's action takes place around a white kitchen table.
My pacing issues are nitpicks, to be sure. But Gabourie does no favours for Miller’s script, which already features an overlong ending, with an epilogue that lays on the utter tragedy of the Loman family rather thick.
As well, Gabourie’s finale leaks with directorial clichés: In its final beats, the cast faces the audience square-on to deliver the play’s thesis statement as paper leaves float down from the rafters and an orange sunset shines brightly behind black silhouettes.
But Miller’s play couldn’t be better-suited to 2026. Who among us isn’t feeling the pinch of inflation, the terror of planning for an uncertain future? And the text is one that grows with its audience: You’ll likely experience it differently as a retiree than you did as a young adult, or as a high-schooler reading the play in English class.
Raymond Strachan, left, as Bernard and Josh Johnston as Willy's son Happy Loman.
It helps that even Gabourie’s supporting cast is top-notch, offering bold choices that ground Willy’s demise in the real world. Sean Arbuckle turns Howard Wagner, one of the play’s smaller parts, into a can’t-look-away villain, the supervisor’s cruelty tucked masterfully between smiling teeth. A pivotal scene between Howard and Willy is explosive and awful, in the best way, from McCamus’s sizzling “promises made” monologue to the stitch in Arbuckle’s brow that never quite fades, even as he calls Willy “kid” under the guise of intergenerational affection.
And so, while Gabourie could represent Willy’s descent into his self-made hell more tightly, the director valiantly honours the father’s fear of dementia, the bite of his professional rejection. All things considered, Death of a Salesman hits most of the right notes in its indictment of the American dream – though the best ones are blared from the bell of Johnson’s weathered trumpet, the bluesy melody an albatross in the Lomans’ creaking kitchen.