Meanwhile, Hoffman, as Willy, grows more gaseous, more entropic, more psychologically atomized. Biff’s working his way up to the play’s epiphany, the flinging-away of Willy’s dreams, and Garfield concentrates his power in his rangy, dangerous limbs, which operate as perfect extensions of his rangy, dangerous voice.

Thirty-four, beautiful, and shattered, he’s a living rebuke to Willy’s polestar mythology of “personal attractiveness” and likability as all-purpose existential insurance policy. “I’m not dressing to advantage, maybe.” Upstairs, Biff (Andrew Garfield) - his son, his sinewy inverse - paces his childhood bedroom. “I’m very - foolish to look at, Linda,” he confides to his long-suffering wife (Linda Emond). Hoffman seems, almost in response, to seethe and deflate all at once: Hostility and self-loathing blend perfectly. Of all Willy Loman’s famous heartbreaker lines in Death of a Salesman (“Isn’t that remarkable?” “He’s liked, but he’s not well-liked”), it’s a less-heralded snatch of dialogue that Philip Seymour Hoffman chooses to colonize with his signature Hoffmanness: “I’m fat,” Willy says, sighing like a flat tire, producing some of the most uncomfortable laughs I’ve ever heard.

Old vs new death of a salesman script