Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller

 The classic play from 1947, in a fresh Penguin Modern Classic edition with a besautifully evocative cover.  Miller sets out to do what nowadays seems impossible to conceive - a tragedy played out in suburbia.  Yet he achieves everything he wanted.  I can't remember reading a playscript so moving, with characters that leap off the page.  And as a four-time graduate in drama, let's just say I have read a lot of playscripts.

Willy Loman is a travelling salesman, thirty-five years on the road, but he's coming to the end.  He literally can't keep his mind on the road, which makes him a danger to himself and others.  He can't afford to retire, nor does he want to.  The road is his life.  The road enables him to maintain the illusion he's a big shot, a success.  Being at home is, for Willy, a reminder of failure.  Whatever his successes, real or imagined, as a seller of goods, as a father and provider he's a dud.  His two thirty-something sons are back in their boyhood bedroom, Biff a failed football player back from being little more than a bum out West, and Happy, assistant to a deputy in some dead-end business.  The house Willy has slaved to buy is crumbling, like the car and refrigerator both on hire purchase.

The rwo days we experience in the two acts are when the tragedy builds to its inevitable climax.  All the lies, the pretences, the missed opportunities - all come crashing down.   I didn't spot a flat note in the entire script.  What a challenge for actors!   What a feast for play-goers and those, like me, who can now only bear to read plays, such is the decayed condition of the theatre in Britain.   A reminder of what once was possible.

The Misfits - Arthur Miller

 An unusual find this, dating from a time when publishers were experimenting with publishing film scripts in book form.  Penguin went with a cleaned-up script for Tennessee Williams's Baby Doll (reviewed below) but for The Misfits opted for a hybrid - the movie described in present tense (like the screenplay) but with emotions written in and lyrical evocations of the landscape.  It works surprisingly well.

Roslyn is in Reno for a divorce.  She meets up with widower Guido and divorced Gay and later, the rodeo rider Perce.  They are all misfits.  Roslyn doesn't fit with ordinary married life, Guido flies a plane but there's nowhere really to fly to, and Gay and Perce are cowboys out of their era.  They end up trying to catch mustangs for dog food, an extraordinarily powerful concept, and all their subsumed emotions - their half-baked attempts to fit in - come to a head.

I've never seen the movie, put off because it's the last film for Monroe and Gable, but the sadness is present in the book, too.