Stratford Festival review: Death of a Salesman delivers heartbreaking distance between father and son

From left, Joe Perry as Biff Loman and Tom McCamus as Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman. Stratford Festival 2026.

After I watched Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy’s Salesman in China a few seasons ago at the Stratford Festival, that notion that the universally understood message in playwright Arthur Miller’s most renowned work isn’t necessarily about the pressures of capitalism but about a strained relationship between father and son has stayed with me ever since.

If you didn’t see Salesman in China, it was based on Miller’s efforts to produce his famed play for Chinese audiences after the U.S. and China opened up formal diplomatic relations in the ‘70s. In a nutshell, Miller had to find a way for the story’s message to be relatable to people who did not share the same culture, history or economic systems as his American audiences. The result was a production focused more on the strained relationship between Willy Loman and his son, Biff Loman, than a man being crushed by the nature of capitalism after spending his whole life on the road, trying to get ahead and provide for his family.

So that was the context I brought to the Avon Theatre on opening night of this season’s production of Death of a Salesman, directed by Dean Gabourie, and I was not disappointed.

While the story centres around Willy Loman (Tom McCamus) as he’s forced to consider hanging up his hat as a travelling salesman as a result of his failing memory and vivid flashbacks to when he and his wife, Linda Loman (Lucy Peacock), were raising their boys – Biff Loman (Joe Perry) and Happy Loman (Josh Johnston) – it’s the relationship between Willy and Biff that really forms the emotional core of this production.

Between flashbacks to happier and more financially stable times for the Loman family and the family struggling in the play’s present-day timeline to support Willy as his dementia worsens and he’s forced to plead for a job that doesn’t involve so much travelling, Biff is forced to reckon with his father’s disappointment that he hadn’t yet lived up to the potential Willy saw in his eldest son when he was younger.

Supported beautifully by both Peacock and Johnston, whose characters seem to be driven by a well-intentioned but somewhat misguided desire to protect Willy and keep him from getting angry – a trigger for his flashbacks – McCamus and Perry do a remarkable job depicting that all-important strife between father and son while demonstrating at least the baseline level of love and support for each other one might expect from such a relationship.

Though Perry as Biff finds it near impossible to have even the most basic of conversations with his father without it turning into a fight, he ultimately understands his father’s desire to see him succeed in life, even if he feels he’s falling short of that expectation and chooses to remove his father from his life altogether.

McCamus as Willy, meanwhile, finds joy in supporting his son – the best way he knows how with an unending stream of unsolicited advice from his life on the road – but he almost immediately and predictably loses his temper every time his son fails to achieve the dreams he has for him.

In the end, the American Dream seems almost impossible for both Willy and Biff at this stage in their lives – something they actually have in common – and it leads to Willy making the ultimate sacrifice, which he believes will secure his son’s future success in business.

The design for this production is beautiful in its simplicity, from Stanley, the lone onstage trumpet player (Michael Lousi Johnson), who provides the hauntingly classic score, to the set – an apartment complex courtyard surrounded on three sides by towering buildings and apartment windows lit in different colours to portray the mood of each scene.

The use of lighting and practical effects to depict flashbacks and set the stage for Willy’s hallucinated conversations with his estranged and long-dead brother, Ben (David W. Keeley), to whom Willy sees as a prime example of someone who achieved success in his life, also adds to the surreal blending of past and present in this production.

Death of a Salesman is a must-see at the Stratford Festival this season. It runs at the Avon Theatre until Oct. 24.