The English Department Website

Overview of all 4 Texts

Death of a Salesman

In ‘Death of a Salesman’, Miller shows us the descent into madness and absurd suicide of a self-deceiving, uneducated failed salesman with a dysfunctional family. He is a bullying man, sustained by ridiculous dreams, ignoring one son, unfaithful to his wife, a poor provider, has blighted the life of his favoured son, is  indifferent & hostile to his friends, is openly dishonest and boastful, of limited intelligence, lacking in insight and delusional. His final sacrifice may even be futile – it is certainly not welcomed by anyone. At his death, he is mourned by a handful of uncomprehending people and he has failed even to leave seeds in the ground that will flourish.

And yet, Miller has succeeded in creating out of this pathetic figure an image of striving and suffering sufficiently moving to attain a tragic grandeur. For all his faults, Willy’s dream of success and happiness embodies significant aspects of the American Dream and his family turmoil, inner contradictions, material struggles, poignant nostalgia and sense of bewildered incomprehension at his own inability to alter events are universal. Growing old, fearful of losing his sanity, no longer able to earn a living, in constant conflict with his sons, living ever more in the past yet focusing all his hopes on his sons’ future, still believing in a system which exploits him ruthlessly, Willy is both an archetype of flawed humanity and an individual of complexity and depth. Through him, Miler is able to deal with one of the central issues of his and our time: personal integrity in a competitive world. This is primarily explored through the way in which dreams and aspirations are nourished in the family and the way in which the individual can give meaning to his life through work. Miller sets out in particular to show the influence of the past on the present and this accounts for the techniques he deploys in the play, in particular:  

A Dolls House is about one woman’s painful journey towards the awareness that everything she valued and respected is worthless, that the happy marriage she delighted in was a sham, that her friendships were shallow and built on deceit, that all the bourgeois values of respectability, religion and legality are based upon hypocrisy and that the prime duty she has is not to her loving husband and children but to herself.

A play that begins with a pretty, happy young wife coming through a door and decorating her comfortable home for her husband and children ends with the slamming of that same door as she rejects her home and all it represents. It is both a bleak and a magnificent moment and so powerful a symbolic attack upon respectable normality that it is still as shocking now as it was over 100 years ago.

Translations is set in a time in Irish history when society is about to be transformed for ever. The language and culture are suffering from the twin invasions of the English army and the English language, attitudes to which are mixed, whilst the natural disaster of the potato blight is set to bring starvation and exodus. In effect, although balancing romantic nostalgia with realism, the play shows the zenith of Irish culture, a people rich in learning, living in a settled community and in touch with centuries of  history are about to be displaced.

 The play looks at the relationship between language, culture and identity and was especially relevant to the time when it was written as it both shows some of the origins of the bitter dispute known as ‘The Troubles’ and illustrates a community driven to violent resistance against its will and an invading force driven to repression despite its early best intentions. The tragic irony of the play is that we, the audience, are invited to witness an idyllic present which the characters think will continue indefinitely yet which we know, by the very language in which the play is written, is doomed.  

In Top Girls Churchill deals with some of the most difficult questions of contemporary life – and typically concludes with these questions resolutely unanswered. Her manner of approaching even the most intractable issues, however, tends to be playful, startling, and subversively comic rather than authoritative and confrontational. Churchill’s plays are, above all, theatrical. Their theatricality energizes the process of open-ended questioning that empowers audiences to ask further questions and seek satisfactory answers in the world outside the theatre.

The social comedy Top Girls cleverly shifts multiple perspectives in order to explore the nature and meaning of success—economic, social and professional—for women in a world dominated by men. If women have to give up or redefine an essential part of themselves, how is the ultimate achievement to be valued? What kind of accomplishment is it to be successful in a competitive (and destructive) way?

Churchill’s ambitious work challenges dominant societal and cultural conventions and assumptions about gender roles and the status of women, capitalism, class and the family. Frequently her specific dramaturgy

When Angie appears at the Top Girls agency, the inequities of a system that rewards the few exceptional women are made apparent. Angie, being intellectually limited and socially maladjusted, will never make it by Marlene’s standards. With this condition as a given, the final scene of Top Girls, the confrontation between the two value systems represented by Joyce and Marlene, which occurred one year earlier, takes on an even more plaintive note, since Churchill has already shown her audience the dim prospects for Angie’s future. This disruption of chronology is intentionally unsettling in that it refuses to allow the spectator to fantasise a sentimental ending for Angie and people like her.

The technique of intricately overlapping dialogue, whilst giving an aura of realism to the conversation, more importantly enables Churchill to embody these differences in her text. The characters interrupt and talk across each other not to demonstrate that “women … don’t learn sufficiently from their accumulated experience” as Benedict Nightingale put it in New Statesman, but rather because they are locked in separate discourses.