When Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman premiered in 1948, the closure and demolition of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ stadium at Ebbets Field was a decade away.

Director Neil Armfield’s production of Miller’s modern-day tragedy, which is scheduled to open at Sydney’s Theatre Royal mid-May, brings these the two events into resonant proximity.

Josh Helman and Anthony LaPaglia in Death of a Salesman. Photo © Jeff Busby

The idea, Armfield tells Limelight, emerged from a re-reading of Miller’s autobiography, Time Bends.

“There’s a passage in which he describes being at the amphitheatre at Syracuse just after the war,” Armfield says. “This is a period when he was just about ready to give up as a playwright and he stood in this space where thousands of people would gather. He realised that here had existed a kind of theatre that was poetic, social and necessary and it inspired in Miller the idea that a national theatre was possible – the theatre of a nation and of its civilisation. That great modern tragedies were possible. When he went back to the States, he wrote Salesman.”

It seemed right, says Armfield, that Death...