UNSURPRISINGLY, until it acquired classic status, what is now universally regarded as Arthur Miller’s greatest play was never as popular in the US as in Britain in the years following its Broadway premiere in 1949.

Miller’s surgical analysis of the chimera of the American dream — “the only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell” — was seen as subversive in a society heading into cold-war McCarthyite hysteria.

Now that the dream is recognised widely as a nightmare come true, the play emerges as a powerful study of a human being struggling to shore up his crumbling sense of identity as he fights desperately against the gnawing guilt that his fantasies have destroyed the family he loves.

Its protagonist, the ageing travelling salesman Willy Loman, faces an acute crisis — his selling touch is failing, not that it was ever as magically successful as his boastful imagination claims.

His patiently supportive wife Linda knows this while his two adult sons have, in their separate ways, been poisoned by his deluded philosophy that all you need to reach the top is to be well-liked.

Loman has been viewed by some as a modern King Lear but Antony Sher’s consummate performance — a gravelly voiced walrus, hiding his fear of failure and the emptiness inside by a barrage of words as if language can defy reality — never allows the hope of redemption and self-knowledge.

Harriet Walter’s Linda struggles to hold the family together while his drifter son Biff (Alex Hassell) — whose youthful expectations fuelled by his doting father’s certainties have been savagely crushed by his knowledge of the corruption at their heart — is the real tragic victim. His brother Happy (Sam Mark) contents himself with his easy sexual prowess and his father’s delusions.

The scene where Loman, fired from the business he has served for decades, meets his sons for a celebratory dinner in a restaurant is almost too painful to watch. Expecting news of Biff’s success in obtaining financial backing from an ex-boss, his hopes are inevitably shattered and he is left broken as they desert him for a couple of likely pick-ups.

Stephen Brimson Lewis’ expressionist set — the family house, surrounded by Brooklyn brownstone tenements — captures the claustrophobic stranglehold of Loman’s world while allowing the necessary flexibility for the constant time-slips to earlier optimistic days or when he communes with his dead brother who “escaped” to make a fortune in the diamond mines of Africa.

Like Shakespeare’s tragedies, there can never be a definitive production of this beautiful play, with its complex structure but simple portrayal of a world where materialistic success is the measure destroying human values. Yet Gregory Doran’s production captures that essential truth for our own times.

Runs until May 2, box office: rsc.org.uk