Stratford Festival review: Salesman in China is storytelling magic

Take it from playwright Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman was never a play about the American Dream or the slow dissolution of capitalism.

No, Miller’s generational epic was always a play about fathers and sons. Anything else, the playwright said, was happenstance, meaning the work could transcend any number of borders and cultural differences. Surely, even audiences in, say, China, could understand the throbbing heart at the centre of one of the most important American plays of all time.

That’s the premise of Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy’s crushing, gorgeous Salesman in China, playing in the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre until Oct. 26. Suggested by the memoirs of Miller and director Ying Ruocheng, the play recounts the Chinese premiere of Death of a Salesman in 1983 at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. That production was directed by Miller (portrayed here by Festival favourite Tom McCamus as an erratic, sensitive beast), and as Sy and Brodie tell it, problems emerged from the very first day of rehearsal. Chinese actors didn’t understand the concept of a travelling salesman, nor were they familiar with the life insurance peddled by Death of a Salesman’s protagonist, the famously suicidal Willy Loman.

But the premiere pushed ahead, led by Ruocheng, tenderly represented in Salesman in China by the stunning Adrian Pang 彭耀順. In Salesman in China, we watch Ruocheng and Miller collide and ricochet, each holding dark secrets close to their chests. When the men listen to one another, they’re the fastest of friends, two fathers trying their best to create art; when they barrel forward with the traditions prescribed to them by their respective cultures, they’re sworn adversaries.

Brodie and Sy, who also directs, have imbued Salesman in China with acres of care. At no point does the story feel like a Canadian, American or Chinese perspective of what happened in Beijing in 1983 — thanks to thoughtful dramaturgy and impeccable casting, Salesman in China offers equal weight to those three competing vantage points. The play is fully bilingual thanks to projected subtitles and translations by Fang Zhang, and most of the actors switch between Mandarin and English with ease, never losing emotional momentum to the relentless sprint of the language….

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