Tom McCamus as Arthur Miller (front-left) and Adrian Pang 彭耀順 as Ying Ruocheng (front-right) with, from left: 郝邦宇 Steven Hao as Li Shilong, Phoebe Hu 胡馨勻 as Zhu Lin, Harriet Chung 鍾浩賢 as Hui Li and Derek Kwan 關顯揚 as Mo in Salesman in China.David Hou/Stratford Festival
- Title: Salesman in China
- Written by: Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy
- Chinese translations by: Fang Zhang
- Director: Jovanni Sy
- Actors: Adrian Pang, Tom McCamus
- Company: The Stratford Festival
- Venue: Avon Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Oct. 26
Critic’s Pick
The Stratford Festival has never mounted as impressive a world premiere as Salesman in China, a brilliant new backstage drama by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy about a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman performed at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983.
Directed by Sy with a style and sophistication not seen on the festival’s only proscenium stage at the Avon Theatre since Robert Lepage’s Coriolanus, this inaugural large-scale production could be picked up and proudly presented on any major international stage tomorrow.
I would hope artistic directors from the big British rep companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and Broadway producers, in particular, are going to fly in and take a look. This is really a major moment in Stratford’s history – one financially assisted by the National Creation Fund at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where the production heads in January.
Salesman in China’s main focus is on the Chinese actor and translator Ying Ruocheng, played by the Singaporean theatre artist Adrian Pang in a tremendously poignant performance filled with humour.
Ying has invited Miller (Tom McCamus at his surly best) to direct his most famous play in Beijing, during a period of tentative openness when post-Mao reforms were centre stage, but renewed repression was waiting in the wings.
His desire to play the part of Willy Loman comes out of a personal connection he feels to Death of a Salesman’s themes of fathers and sons – one that gets teased out in the course of the action.
But Ying also has a dream – born of a mix of family, artistic and political motivations – of bringing his country and the West closer; in the not-so-distant past, this led to the imprisonment of both him and wife, Wu Shiliang (Jo Chim), during the Cultural Revolution.
From the left: Sarah Orenstein as Inge Morath, Phoebe Hu 胡馨勻 as Zhu Lin, Jo Chim 詹翠珊 as Wu Shiliang and Agnes Tong 唐若馨 as Liu Jun in Salesman in China.David Hou/Stratford Festival
Amid a comedy of clashing cultural perspectives and language in the rehearsal room, and a drama of increasing pressure, interference and threats from Chinese government officials, Ying begins to wonder if it was a bright idea to try to be a bridge between the U.S. and China.
“When war breaks out, bridges are the first things that get blown up,” he says to his wife.
“Not if they’re useful to both sides,” Wu replies, sagely.
Visiting China, Miller’s feelings that back at home he is a has-been – and that after his death, he will be remembered primarily for his marriage to the late Marilyn Monroe – come to the surface.
So too does the aging American playwright’s need to provoke, supposedly in the interest of art and honesty, but as he complains about his perception that the Chinese artists are reticent to open up, his wife, the photographer Inge Morath (Sarah Orenstein), reminds him that there are painful matters that they don’t speak about either.
In a clever dramaturgical device, Ying’s inner world does actually open up – as does the play’s theatricality – after he has a breakthrough in rehearsing one of the scenes from Death of a Salesman in which Willy Loman is physically in one place while his mind is in another.
Miller’s directorial comment that, when it comes to blocking, “the walls are wherever you want them to be” allows Ying to start to live in the past and present at once – and lets the audience see the terror and the boredom of getting through the Cultural Revolution live in his body and mind. (This also allows us, memorably, to get to see a snippet of one of Madame Mao’s revolutionary operas of that period.)
Salesman in China is full of fascinating insights into the links between geopolitics and the personal lives of Miller and Ying (inspired by Miller’s diary of rehearsals published in 1984 and Ying’s posthumous 2009 biography, Voices Carry). But it is also a piece of bilingual, intercultural theatre – with well-located easy-to-read projected subtitles in English when the characters speak Mandarin and vice versa – that smartly interrogates its own form and the controversies that surround it (see also, Lepage).
A Chinese actress (Agnes Tong), balking at wearing a slip on stage, opens up a conversation of the relative benefits and drawbacks of Western and Communist approaches to female liberation. Meanwhile, Miller’s insistence that the theatre not use the putty noses and chins common at the time in depictions of Americans is a chance to reflect on the West’s history of problematic representational practices from a different angle, while also exploring the fine line between righteous outrage and disrespectful bullying.
In Sy’s production, aided by a fluid, cinematic set design by Joanna Yu, everything hits just the right tone – even the snippets from Death of Salesman that we see gain emotional power over the course of the rehearsals.
Complementing Pang’s ecstatic angst as Willy Loman, Steven Hao gives a powerful performance as Li Shilong playing Biff Loman – and all-around stand-out Phoebe Hu’s performance as Zhu Lin delivering Linda Loman’s monologue brings the audience to tears as we see both it and the backstage reactions to it on opening night.
This ensemble within the ensemble is so good that you might want to come back and see them do the entire play in Mandarin.