A revival of Death of a Salesman is shining a light on the 'manosphere'

Alison Whyte stars opposite Anthony LaPaglia in triumphant return of Death of a Salesman The first play Australian actor Alison Whyte ever saw on stage might have been Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It was 1983, when Whyte — who you might recognise from ABC TV's 90s news satire Frontline — was a teenager growing up in Hobart. The cast of the Tasmanian Theatre Company production was led by stalwart of the state's theatre scene, the late John Unicomb, as the downtrodden salesman of the title, Willy Loman, and Judith Fisher (Silver City) as the emotional heart of the play, his wife Linda. "We got very little theatre down in Tassie [then], so I've got quite a strong memory of it," Whyte says. "I remember my beautiful drama teacher waxing lyrical about it, but it didn't strike a chord for me then like it does now." What it did do was help spark her love of performing, with the then-student musing she'd like to be up on stage herself. Forty-odd years later, Whyte is playing Linda Loman, opposite Anthony LaPaglia, in a revival of Death of a Salesman that premiered in 2023 and this year tours Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. This Death of a Salesman takes place at Ebbets Field baseball stadium, the site of one of Willy's great disappointments. The rest of the cast keep watch from the bleachers, as Willy reckons with how his family and his industry has changed, trying to understand what his life has been worth, as Linda encourages him to keep going. "Linda is a beautiful role and I feel very privileged to play it," she says. "You don't get this sort of writing often. "[Linda] holds a lot of sadness, and you feel it [as an actor] too. "You go, 'oh God, that's right', when you come back to the role. It's like childbirth all over again: You forget, then you come back." Since she last played Linda, in Sydney in 2024, Whyte has found new cultural resonances in the play. She has been thinking about the idea of the "manosphere" in relation to the Lomans' two sons, Biff and Happy, who wrestle throughout the play with restrictive expectations of masculinity. "What's happening with the Tate brothers, you can pour all that into this play," Whyte says. "I'd hate to be the Tate brothers' mother." It's just one example of the pertinent issues — alongside greed and capitalism and the sometimes-strained relationship between fathers and sons — that "bubble up each time we do it", Whyte says. "It's such a deeply human play that deals with such deeply human issues it has relevance still." An early love of the stage Around the time Whyte first saw Death of a Salesman, she started studying and performing in plays at her all-girls high school. One was Alan Seymour's Anzac Day drama The One Day of the Year, where she read the role of WWII veteran Alf. Years later, and by then a working actor, she approached Seymour outside Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre. "I ran up to him and said: 'My name's Alison, I played Alf!'" she recalls. "And he was just looking at me like, 'What?', and I had to explain I went to an all-girls school." She would also take on the herdsman in Oedipus, a coup she recalls as "thrilling", because she was younger than her fellow actors. "It was a year 11 or 12 production and I was in year nine or 10, and I got a featured role," she says. "I didn't have to play chorus!" Later, she performed in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie — a show she returned to earlier this year, at Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC), where she played southern matriarch Amanda Wingfield. "It was a lot more fun than that I expected it to be," Whyte admits. "Amanda is a piece of work, but totally fun to play. "She had to be to survive in that environment as a woman in that time, and as a single mother, bringing up two children [alone] in the depression." In a full-circle moment, her high school drama teacher, now in her 90s, came to see the show. "She absolutely loved it," Whyte says. "It was really nice to do that in front of her in a professional setting." Those early stage roles helped get Whyte into the Victorian College of the Arts, which in turn landed her at MTC, in shows like Noël Coward's Present Laughter and Hay Fever and another Arthur Miller play, The Crucible. "I was working with people like Pamela Rabe and had a really amazing sort of apprenticeship straight out of drama school, going straight in and doing play after play after play," Whyte says. The role people still talk about In 1994, Whyte scored her first major TV role as overwhelmed producer Emma on Frontline, opposite Rob Sitch as newsreader Mike Moore. The brainchild of The D-Generation and The Late Show's Sitch, Jane Kennedy, Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner, Frontline is the gig people still approach Whyte on the street about. "We were kamikaze telly," Whyte says. "It was just so much fun." She describes the quick turnaround of just a few days between filming and going to air and the fleet-footed camera-work of Cilauro and Joanne Donahoe-Beckwith. "They would shoot the whole scene with a single handheld camera," Whyte explains. "We'd be ducking under tables when Jo would turn around with the camera, so we weren't there [in shot]." Whyte praises the "well-honed" scripts she received for Frontline. "You didn't have to do a lot," she says, adding how lucky she was to have that experience as a young actor. But what was really striking was the strange "synchronicity" or prescience of some of the storylines. "There were times when you would see a promo for Today Tonight or A Current Affair and just go, 'Oh my God, that's in the [Frontline] episode this week'," she recalls. Dreams for the future While Whyte is a regular on Australian screens, including recently on crime dramas Scrublands and Jack Irish, her first love is the stage. It's about more than just the adrenaline rush of performing live. "I love presenting a whole story, and understanding your bit in it, your little wheel, your cog, in that story — that's what I love," she says. "[Theatre is] so basic. It's sitting around a fire and telling a story and doing it communally." Playing both Amanda in The Glass Menagerie and Linda in Death of a Salesman in one year has Whyte feeling lucky. "I could retire happy now — not that I'm going to," she says, before playfully berating herself. "Why would you say that out loud, in this industry, in this country?" She'd love to take on the wife and mother in another Miller play, All My Sons — a story about ordinary people's culpability in war that feels pertinent to today. But she's not picky: "It's such a small industry here — you just grab what you can and enjoy it while it lasts." Still, Whyte's sense of good fortune hasn't made her complacent. She's all too aware of just how difficult it is to pursue a career in the arts in Australia, especially in theatre. "We need to value [the arts] more," Whyte says. She compares the arts to sport and its place in the national imagination, specifically to Australia's gargantuan medal tally at the Commonwealth Games, which she sees as the product of sustained investment. "Where is the arts funding?" she asks. "Where is the importance placed on the arts? "The story of winning a medal is black and white. You either win or you lose — there's no grey patches. We need more grey in this world. And that's what theatre and storytelling can bring. "We need culture. Otherwise, we're not going to survive as a species." Death of a Salesman is at Her Majesty's Theatre, Melbourne, until August 22, before touring Brisbane and Adelaide.