Row over changes to Death Of A Salesman A leading Australian theatre company has been caught in a row with the American holders of rights to Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman after ditching the epilogue and changing the way that lead character Willy Loman dies. Sydney's Belvoir theatre company has been forced to reinstate the final scene of Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play after an anonymous tip-off to the US agent about changes. The company was only allowed to continue with the play - at the Theatre Royal - on condition it reinstated the play's Requiem. The production, starring Colin Friels as the eponymous salesman Loman, has also aroused controversy by altering the nature of Willy's death from the original text. In the 1949 work, which won a Tony award for best play of the year, it is not specified that Willy crashes his car on purpose and dies. In the Belvoir production, he commits suicide by gassing himself in the oven. The reason Miller (who was married to Marilyn Monroe) did not specify that failed salesman Loman had committed suicide was so that the character's son Biff would be able to use the insurance money from his father's life policy to start his own business. Simon Stone, the resident director at Belvoir, defended the changes in a comment piece in the Brisbane Times, saying: "I brought the suicide onstage because we've all now witnessed the death of the [American] dream, or more correctly we're watching it dying. So in my production we watch Willy die with it. Audiences have responded very strongly to this choice and while it can be argued it doesn't reflect the author's original intention of the act, it reflects our contemporary relationship to it. And so the moment exists, as theatre does, suspended between Miller's time and ours. The epilogue I removed from the play in the Belvoir production has been reinstated for the Theatre Royal season due to copyright restrictions. By removing it I wanted to express the uncertainty of our times. We don't know what will come next. The ending became a question mark over the play and its place in our history. But I'm not dismayed at the need to replace it. The Theatre Royal is a very different theatre architecturally to Belvoir. The epilogue will be able to float outside the space. It will play not as a conclusion to our production. In 2003, the estate of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett threatened to close Belvoir's production of Waiting for Godot because of the addition of music to the play.