Death of a Salesman review – Arthur Miller’s timeless tale of a small man crushed by big dreams

He lies to gain status. His every deal is transactional. He exaggerates for effect. He is seduced by money, deluded about his importance and clearly going to leave his sons with a father complex.

Yet Willy Loman is no president. The ordinary guy at the centre of Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic might have fallen for a Trumpian myth about the self-made man – crushing competition, fighting for family, privileging the individual – but he is at the losing end of the equation. “The only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell,” his old neighbour admonishes, knowing this exhausted salesman has sold his last.

It is the exhaustion David Hayman plays best. In Andy Arnold’s no-nonsense touring production for Raw Material and Trafalgar, with its live music and open staging, the actor starts out crumpled and broken. That someone has called him a “little squirt” seems cruel, but you can see why. He is drained of colour in a sepia world, deflated and beat. The optimism that sustained him over long years of pushing product to the buyers of New England has become all empty promise. His old lines no longer resonate. He tries them out anyway.

Waking up to the lie … Dan Cahill and Michael Wallace in Death of a Salesman. Photograph: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

So desolate is he that it is hard to see the charismatic huckster he once was. Behind the hyperbole, we can suppose he used to have at least some charm and skill, but here it is too distant a memory. Was he ever well liked? All that remains is the damage, not only to himself but to the family who have bought into the illusion.

In an especially powerful performance by Dan Cahill, his son Biff is waking up to the lie. Well matched in stocky physicality with Michael Wallace as brother Happy, he gives every impression of the sportsman gone to seed, a dropout searching for meaning when he can no longer measure success in trophies and sales targets. He carries a brute, inarticulate anger.

Offsetting their angst, Beth Marshall gives a fine, subtle performance as mother Linda, showing her as the rock that holds the family together, balanced, forgiving and wiser than anyone in an economic system that is cruel and dehumanising.