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Posted By: Hamza Malik
About this Talent:
Reborn, This Time in Mandarin
A new play turns Arthur Miller’s experience of directing the play in Beijing into a bilingual
meditation on cross-cultural encounters.
By Han Zhang
October 27, 2023
Jo Mei in the play Salesman
The actor Jo Mei in the play “Salesman,” by Jeremy Ting. Photograph by Maria Baranova /
Courtesy Everyman Agency
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In March, 1983, Arthur Miller arrived in Beijing to direct a Chinese staging of “Death of a
Salesman” at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. Opening night was six weeks away and his
thoughts were crowded with technical and ideological uncertainties. Beijing Reni, as the
People’s Theatre was popularly known, was the country’s most prestigious modern-drama
institution, but, all the same, sound effects and music had to be produced with a decades-old East
German tape recorder, the set designer was obliged to make a cardboard box stand in for a
refrigerator, and the lights would go dim during daytime rehearsals, because the whole city’s
voltage dropped when factories were in operation. Miller, who did not speak any Chinese, would
be entirely reliant on an interpreter as he directed, and he worried, too, about what else might be
lost in translation: could a society long removed from commercial life make sense of a man like
Willy Loman, whose dreams and crises were so bound up in nineteen-forty American
materialism?
Salient Features:
| Job Price:1000 | Duration : 1 Day |
| Location: Rs.Attock | Languages Known : english |
