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