AT first it might seem too soon for another Yorkshire theatre to be staging Arthur Miller’s 1949 dismantling of the American Dream, after Damian Cruden’s magnificent production at York Theatre Royal in November 2008.

However, with America already restless with Obama’s new dawn and the global crisis afflicting redundancy-threatened workers at large, the shattering tale of travelling salesman Willy Loman is as prescient as ever.

Sarah Esdaile’s production is initially more striking for its design by Francis O’Connor. Having co-directed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the Playhouse, Esdaile understands the theatrical possibilities of the expansive Quarry stage, and she and O’Connor use every inch available.

The Loman house – home to enervated salesman Willy (Philip Jackson), his doting wife Linda (Marion Bailey) and sons Happy (Nick Barber) and the troubled Biff (Lex Shrapnel) – is presented in an open-plan design on three levels, with the brothers suffocating in the attic under the weight of their father’s expectations.

So far, so conventional. What sets this production apart is the long curtain that stretches to the horizon, not only a symbol of Willy’s many years on the road but also of the hidden secrets of that life, exposed in silhouetted figures.

Can the performance, the guts and blood of the play, match such an outstanding, almost scene-stealing design? No and yes. Maybe it was press night, maybe too early in the run, but the first half took time to bed down, not least Jackson’s Willy, for all the hunched shoulders and weary feet that conveyed a man struggling to come to terms with a broken American Dream and his own waning powers that leave him unsafe to drive.

Jackson’s physicality does, however, bring a more imposing sense of threat to his constant burdening of his sons with his own dreams and his increasingly brusque dismissals of his wife.

The second half, wherein the complexities of the father-and-son relationship peak, is far stronger. Jackson acquires pathos, his American Everyman crumbling before us in the greatest of American tragedies, where the constant flow between present and optimistic past heighten Willy’s suicidal plight. Shrapnel’s Biff, no less a victim of a dream too far, raises the bar too in the devastating finale.

If push comes to shove, Cruden’s production was the more complete, its lead performance superior, the direction more distinctive, bringing Miller’s language to maximum impact.

At the Playhouse, the ultimate talking point will be the poetic visual brilliance of Esdaile and O’Connor’s imagery, be it Willy’s garden plot turning into his grave or the set being pulled away – in an echo of Stephen Daldry’s An Inspector Calls – to reveal the narrowing road below, on which Loman’s family may be trudging to a dead end… or maybe not.

Death Of A Salesman, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until May 29. Box office: 0113 213 7700.