By Arthur Miller
Black Swan State Theatre
Company
Directed by Adam Mitchell
Designed by Trent Suidgeest
Sound design by Ben Collins
Featuring Austin
Castiglione, Adriane Daff, Eden Falk, Luke Hewitt, Talei Howell-Price, Josh McConville,
Caroline McKenzie, Jo Morris, Ben O’Toole, Igor Sas and John Stanton
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until May 25
 |
| Trent Suidgeest |
The
published text of Arthur Miller’s familiar tragedy of the salesman Willy Loman
begins with a description, in unprecedented detail, of its setting. The way the
play looks, and what its look says, was clearly important to the writer.
The
director of this solid, but only partly satisfying, revival for Black Swan, Adam
Mitchell, and his designers, Alicia Clements and Trent Suidgeest, also intend
for us to read much, and many things, into their interpretation.
Their
vast, grim, set is, at once, a dilapidated industrial space with its grimy
central pillar, sparse furniture and gigantic outlet fan, or a neglected
railway station concourse, a Mean Central Station, its rows of darkened doors
leading to unknown, just as neglected, destinations.
The
doors, with their concrete stoops, could be the Loman’s Brooklyn neighborhood,
the “solid vault of apartment houses around (Willy’s) small, fragile home”
Miller described, but, just as easily, they could be the recesses of Willy’s
mind, the holes in his past he escapes to and from that dominate the play.
Link here to the complete review in The West Australian
