Review: Salesman in China is liked, well liked

19 January 2025

By DARREN ATWATER

In an early scene of Salesman in China, the playwright Arthur Miller tells the cast and crew that his play, Death of a Salesman, is not about the passing of the American dream, as confused students usually write in essays, but actually about fathers and sons.

Like those students, the assembled company is also confused. About a lot of things. Even if most of them understood English, which they don’t, they do not know what a travelling salesman is, nor have they ever come across the concept of ‘life insurance’, a key plot point of the ending of Death of a Salesman. It’s 1983, and Miller has been invited to direct his work at the Beijing’s premiere theatre a few years after the Cultural Revolution has ended and China stuggles to reëngage with the rest of the world.

This new production at the National Arts Centre is a remount of the astounding debut originating at the Stratford Festival last September. As playwrights Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy intended, Salesman in China is a love letter to the theatre but it also blows the dust out of Death of a Salesman itself. This version is no less astounding.

The real life actor and director Ying Ruocheng fell in love with Death of a Salesman a year after its publication in 1948 but those everyday foibles of life – Communist revolution, his father’s self-exile to Taiwan, never to be heard from again, and his own arrest for being an intellectual and sentenced to work in the fields as reëducation – prevented any hope of mounting a version until the early 80s. After making his own translation of Death of a Salesman, Ruocheng had the Beijing People’s Art Theatre invite Miller to come and direct.

Ruocheng’s fictional counterpart (Adrian Pang) is Willy Loman twice over, once as the eponymous salesman in the Beijing production but also, as one risking his professional and personal standing to pull off this production, creates a delusional reality. Fictional Arthur Miller, an extremely prickly Tom McCamus, is irked by his lack of relevance 35 years after writing Death of a Salesman and struggles to connect the angst of a 1940s Brooklyn father with contemporary Chinese people. Both, like almost the entirety of the cast, have reprised their roles from Stratford.

The other cast and crew are just as perplexed. Liu Jun (Agnes Tong) is terrified that audiences, unfamiliar with western theatre, will associate Willy’s mistress, the Woman from Boston character, with herself. Zhu Lin, (Phoebe Hu), cannot understand why Willy’s wife Linda would stay with him and accept his delusions. Costumers Hui Li (Harriet Chung) and Mo (Derek Kwan) are devastated that Miller won’t allow traditional Chinese theatre portrayals of Americans with light coloured wigs, elogonated chins, and exaggerated makeup. Meanwhile, stage manager Ding (Howard Dai) runs his theatre as if it were a Communist-era shoe factory, with art just another product that the Party works to manufacture for the masses . Can Ruocheng and Miller find the Chinese delusions to connect with the American ones?

You do need not be familiar with Death of a Salesman before going in but the experience is so much more enjoyable if you do. From throwaway lines – ‘attention must be paid’ – to Salesman in China’s mirroring of Death of a Salesman’s dreamlike structure, you won’t regret brushing up. We watched the 1985 TV movie of Dustin Hoffman’s run as Willy Loman on Broadway the night before – it’s free (and legal) here on the Plex streaming service and it filled in those ancient gaps in memory.

When the lights went up, from our seats, the opening night audience of Salesman in China looked stunned to us. We probably did to them as well.

Salesman in China continues at the National Arts Centre until January 25.