With Death of a Salesman, playwright Arthur Miller set out to write an Aristotelian tragedy for the American Age. Whether or not it’s a tragedy in the ancient sense of the word has been debated by academics ever since its premiere in 1949.

The critic Eric Bentley famously wrote of the play that “Man is here too little and too passive to play the tragic hero”. Salesman, he opined, was social drama, not tragedy.

But this powerful production, directed by Neil Armfield, backs the case for the latter more persuasively than any other I’ve seen. Sure, Willy Loman is a small man, but he’s also warrior for our times, a conscript in capitalism’s daily fight for survival, “a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.” And like his ancient forebears, hubris is his flaw.

Ben O’Toole, Anthony LaPaglia and Josh Helman in Death of a Salesman. Photo © Brett Boardman

Dispensing with everything domestic, save for a few tables and chairs, Willy Loman’s story is mounted in front of a set of time-worn stadium bleachers.

Visible on the side of a shed the words “EBBETS FIELD”....