After its success in Buenos Aires, the play Muerte de un viajante (Death of a Salesman), one of Arthur Miller’s most famous plays, returns to Madrid’s Teatro Infanta Isabel (Calle del Barquillo, 24), directed by Rubén Szuchmacher, adapted by Natalio Grueso and starring Imanol Arias.
Willy Loman is a travelling salesman who has given all his effort and his professional career to the company he works for. His only objective is to give a better life to his family, his wife and two children, who adore him and to whom he wants to instil the ambition to succeed and move up the social ladder. A tireless worker, he is now sixty-three years old, exhausted and worn out after a life without rest, and he sees his position in the company faltering. His sales are no longer what they used to be and his productivity plummets, causing his relationship with his bosses to become untenable. His marriage is not going well either, and his relationship with his children hides an old secret that fills them with resentment and threatens to destroy the family’s stability.
All this leads him into a spiral of depression and self-destruction, in which his only support is his devoted wife, the only one who seems to understand him. As events become more and more complicated and his dreams fade away, everything is hurtling towards a tragic end to which the defeated traveller seems inexorably doomed. The cruelty of a savage capitalism in which human beings are only worth what they are capable of producing, the frustration of unfulfilled dreams, the inability of parents and children to express their love for each other, the complex relationships between couples and the need to succeed and be accepted by others, are the central themes of this masterpiece of contemporary drama, a devastating reflection on the human being, which, as a good classic, is as current today as when it was written in the middle of the last century. Tickets can be purchased at this link.
