Sir Antony Sher on Bringing RSC’s Death of a Salesman to the West End & Why Willy Loman Is Like William Shakespeare

Antony Sher, the actor-knight who was nominated for a Best Actor Tony Award in 1997 for his performance as the British painter Stanley Spencer in Stanley, has played many of the great Shakespearean roles—now is he tackling one of the American theatrical Everests. The Royal Shakespeare Company mounting of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman officially transfers to the Noel Coward Theatre on May 13, starring Sher as Willy Loman, Harriet Walter as Linda and helmed by Sher's husband Gregory Doran. Broadway.com caught Sir Antony during the final stretch of the play’s initial run in Stratford-upon-Avon to talk setting Shakespeare to one side and the enduring power of Miller’s portrait of failure.

After a lifetime steeped in Shakespeare, you're playing Willy Loman. How did this come about?
It was doing the Arthur Miller play Broken Glass a few years ago at the Tricycle Theatre and then on the West End and that was just so fulfilling and rich that it made me wonder what else by Miller I might be able to do. The RSC spent a couple of years trying to secure the rights and here we are.

Willy Loman has had many famous interpreters over time, including Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Was that nerve-wracking?
It might have been if I had seen any of them, but the fact is I’ve never seen Salesman on stage! [Laughs.] And thank goodness, really, because it can become inhibiting when you come to play the great parts—the famous parts—whether by Shakespeare or anyone else to have images of them in your head.

But hadn’t you been in Salesman before?
That’s right, as part of [director] Richard Eyre’s company at Nottingham in 1977 in a production with the late Jimmy Jewel as Willy Loman. I played the small part of Howard, Willy’s boss. But it’s funny, I don’t have a clear memory at all of that production or of that experience.

If you’re going to play an American role for the RSC, it makes sense to tackle one of Shakespearean dimensions.
Which is why the decision was taken to perform Death of a Salesman on the main Shakespeare stage in Stratford. This was the first time ever that there wasn’t a Shakespeare play on in the main house on Shakespeare’s birthday [April 23] and a lot of people have been slapping Greg [Doran, the director]’s wrists. But I think it’s a completely valid decision: as a modern tragedy, Miller’s play holds its own alongside the great Shakespeare tragedies.

The play seems no less resonant now than in 1949, when it premiered.
And to think that one of the great American plays is about failure—that this country obsessed with success and with making it has this play about failing and about not making it.

Do you feel that Salesman has a particularly strong effect on an audience?
The silence you hear is something I haven’t always encountered in a theater and the degree to which it moves people performance after performance—people who are very upset and find it difficult to talk. There’s also humor in the play, but I wasn’t surprised by that: Miller has a gift for putting very good laughs into the most tragic situations.

You’ve played so many defining roles, but few from the American repertoire. Is there a reason for that?
I think that’s probably true, but the ones I have done have always been significant to me in my career. Torch Song Trilogy was an important play for me to do as a gay man [Sher starred on the West End in actor-author Harvey Fierstein’s original role] and Broken Glass was fascinating because it’s the play where Miller comes out about being Jewish.

What do you mean?
He always insisted he wasn’t a Jewish writer, but a Jew who wrote. In Broken Glass, he absolutely writes about being Jewish and different attitudes to being Jewish.

You’ve written books chronicling your acting experiences—most recently The Year of the Fat Knight, about playing Falstaff in the two Henry IV plays for the RSC.
I find those books very satisfying to do. I started the Falstaff one back while we were still playing it so I was both writing it and doing the illustrations while still doing the part, which I found enormously stimulating. It’s as if the writing and the drawing are enlivening the stage performance at the same time. You’re reminding yourself how this whole extraordinary journey had come about.

Will you be chronicling Willy Loman in the same way?
No, there’ve only been a few of these books and that one felt somehow as if it was crying out to be done because I had never dreamt of playing Falstaff: it was the most strange and unexpected thing that I ended up doing it.

Are you looking forward to reprising the role of Falstaff at BAM in New York next spring?
Yes—it’s is true what people say about playing to a New York audience, that there is a real buzz that is different. Both of my experiences on Broadway [Stanley in 2007 and Primo in 2005] were very exciting and I’m tremendously excited about BAM. That particular auditorium, the Harvey, is one of the most beautiful theaters.

Given its success, was adapting and starring in Primo especially meaningful?
We ran during the summer at the Music Box and I remember people saying at the time that you simply will not get an audience because your audience is Jewish and there are no Jews in New York in the summer because they’ve all gone to their homes in Connecticut. So I was braced for this empty theater and by god, we were delighted by how full it was.

Might you take Willy Loman and Salesman across the Atlantic?
[Laughs.] A company from England doing Miller in New York? We’d be lynched; we’d be torn apart! It’s completely unthinkable. But I’m really delighted that we’re coming to the West End so that the show can have a longer life.