Death Of A Salesman – Play Review
The play Death of a salesman is written by Arthur Miller. It is a massively touching play all about a man constantly chasing the American dream. The Sympathy the audience begins to feel for Willy Loman is shown by the way we feel about him at the end of this play. This is truly an amazing play written the talented Arthur Miller.
We start the play seeing Willy Loman, his two sons and wife at their home as Willy arrives home from a hard days selling, at least this is what he leads Linda, his wife, into thinking. We join the play at the beginning of his failure. We see his get progressively disheartened and borrows money from his neighbour, Charley, and has convinced himself he will eventually be in the position to repay him, although as the audience we can see that this is highly unlikely.
Our sympathy for Willy fades gradually as we realise he doesn’t seem to help himself. We get increasingly annoyed with Willy chasing the American dream; we see he does not accept help as when Charley offers him a job, after Willy is fired from his company. Willy gets extremely offended by this and gets angry wit Charley for insulting his ability to regain his job. Both Charley and Willy now that Charley will never see his money again, and the fact that Charley offers Willy a chance to get his life back on track and Willy refuses makes us feel that Willy is almost lazy and seems unfazed by his situation.
The fact that Willy had an affair makes us feel sorry for Linda and as an audience we feel like Willy deserves all he gets, but we see the way it affects the whole family and when biff and happy both try to get jobs and fail we see that the effort Willy put in with both of them when they were younger has made almost no difference to them. They may have been better of if Willy, like Charley, had just left them to it. Bernard who is Charley’s son is extremely successful but never boasts, the main difference between the two sets of sons its that both Biff and Happy find it necessary to boast non stop, it seems, and Bernard is more laid back and tends not to make a big deal of the fact he can play tennis at a friends house.
Willy treats Linda badly, always starting fights and just generally making little digs. The only time we see a mixture of love, anger and guiltiness on Willy’s part is when Linda is mending her stockings and he remembers that he gave a pair to ‘the women’ and he seems to get a pang of guilt and therefore tells Linda to take off the stockings.
The main problem in Willy’s life is money, but it seems he would rather scrounge of people like Charley than get a real job, like the one Charley offers him. He plays an act when it comes to money as he lies to his family, especially Linda. He wants everyone to think he is rich and successful but really he is unsuccessful and becoming increasingly poor.
Overall this play in touching and also infuriating, we find ourselves getting angry and points in the play, when we see Willy lying to friends and family it seems that the only person he is true to is Charley and that’s only to try and get money and sympathy from him.
We feel extremely sorry for Willy and his family, especially Linda when noone turns up to Willy’s funeral. This seems like the almost perfect end to realistic play. When we see the full picture of Willy’s affair we become almost at one with Linda and tend to feel the same emotions as her, but mostly anger.
