We chat to David Hayman, renowned Scottish actor, on his latest production Death of a Salesman.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Death of a Salesman.
00:01Well, it's the great classic,
00:02great American classic of the 20th century.
00:04I mean, there's no greater American play, I don't think.
00:07And I've always wanted to do an American classic.
00:10In my years at the Citizen,
00:11I was playing Hamlet and Lady Macbeth
00:12and King Lear and all the rest of it.
00:14We never really touched American classics
00:16and I've always wanted to.
00:17So when Trafalgar, so Andy Arnold and I, the director,
00:21we went to Trafalgar after Cyprus Avenue
00:25and said, look, we'd love to do Death of a Salesman.
00:29They thought the idea was terrific
00:30and blessed them for financing this.
00:33I mean, it's a huge cast, a cast of 12.
00:35You rarely get casts that size these days
00:37because of the finances.
00:38And for the first time in my life,
00:39we've got an understudy.
00:41Who will never get on stage.
00:44And you're also, it's not just going to be in Glasgow,
00:47you're taking out and touring across the UK too.
00:47Yeah, that's what's really exciting about it
00:49because it's an all Scottish company
00:51and we're touring the United Kingdom.
00:52We're doing Glasgow, Birmingham, Edinburgh,
00:55Cardiff, Dublin, Crewe.
00:58And I even think we're going to the end of Southend Pier
01:04where some great artists of the past have played.
01:06No, it's really exciting.
01:07It's great.
01:08Tell me a wee bit about the character, Wally Loman,
01:10because maybe a bit different to Cyprus Avenue.
01:13Tell me how you're going to basically
01:15get yourself up for doing that.
01:17You think it's different from Cyprus Avenue,
01:19but it's not really.
01:20It's a tragedy.
01:21It's the story of a man who destroys himself
01:23and his family through the fact
01:26that he lives in a fantasy world.
01:28He's a failed salesman.
01:30Now, usually you get, when you get great tragedies,
01:33they're about kings and queens and tyrants and despots.
01:36This is the tragedy of an ordinary working class man
01:39who takes his two suitcases up and down the cities
01:42and the towns of New England selling his wares.
01:44He's a disaster as a salesman.
01:48It's kind of out of his time.
01:49He believes that charm and a smile on your face
01:54when you crack a few jokes can get you anywhere.
01:57It doesn't, not in the harsh world of America,
02:00just in the post-war.
02:03And he's losing his mind.
02:05And he's slowly, several times he's gone off the road
02:08when he's driving his car,
02:09he just goes into a dram and loses it.
02:12He forgets that he's driving and nearly kills a kid,
02:14which really unsettles him.
02:17That's the very opening of the play.
02:18He just comes home
02:19and he's nearly killed a kid on the highway.
02:20And that sets the tone of it.
02:22So it's the destruction of a man
02:24throughout the two hours of the play.
02:26And it's really, everybody thinks
02:30it's about the American dream.
02:31Yes, it is about the American dream
02:32that you can rise from lowly beginnings
02:35and be anything you want
02:36in the greatest country in the world.
02:38Doesn't always happen.
02:39So he's a failure and he's got to live with this failure.
02:41But he lives part of the time
02:43in his fantasy world in his head.
02:45The original title for the play was Inside His Head,
02:49which is a bit of a daft title, isn't it?
02:53Inside His Head.
02:53So I think Death of a Salesman is much better.
02:56You called it one of the greatest plays
02:57of the 20th century.
02:59One of the greatest American plays, certainly.
03:00It's considered a timeless classic.
03:02That whole idea of the American dream
03:03probably most evident just now
03:05in the flip of the contrast of that,
03:06that what we see, you're bringing something to life
03:10on stage that isn't probably replicated elsewhere
03:14as in reality just now.
03:16And that's probably what makes it so timeless
03:18still to this very day.
03:20Yeah, everybody's got dreams.
03:21We've all got dreams of where we want to be
03:23and who we want to be in terms of our life.
03:25So yeah, and it's got a universal message
03:28that I think anyone can relate to.
03:31It's interesting, I mean,
03:32they did a production in China
03:36and Arthur Miller didn't,
03:39he was really worried about how it was going to go,
03:40but they loved it.
03:41They absolutely loved it.
03:44And they absorbed all the messages.
03:45It's about a family.
03:46It's about the destruction of a family,
03:48a dysfunctional family.