Salesman In Beijing by Arthur Miller (review)

Book Reviews 513 One example must suffice here: in discussing Murphy's attraction to Mr. EndoD, Lyons suggests that the former is "delighted to discover that EndoD's solipsistic world is so complete that the man cannot see him even though his eyes are fixed upon him"; and he goes on to claim that the "experience of being unseen by Mr. EndoD allows Murphy to complete the process of erasing himself from his own field of perception, disciplining his mind to accept his suicide." This interpretation of the final events of the novel is questionable, to say the least. The very passage Lyons uses to make his point (pp. 249-250 in Murphy) goes on to refer to Murphy's sadness, not delight, at finding himself unseen. Moreover, the close of the chapter offers no indication that Murphy intends to corrunit suicide. As he rocks off into his mind , his plans for the coming day are to leave the asylum and return to Celia. True to its stated aims, Samuel Beckett also attempts to place the Irish writer's work in a broader literary context. Comparisons with Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Ionesco and others are offered. Yet in the final analysis, these comparisons remain fragmentary and disparate. Artaud and Brecht, for example, are not even mentioned, although they might at least have offered interesting points ofcontrast (and Lyons has, afteraU, written a book on Brecht). No coherent picture of Beckett's place in modern drama emerges. But this is perhaps asking too much. What we do have is a dutiful tour through Beckett's work, properly appreciative of his genius, and reasonable in its approach. It is meant to be useful to a certain group of readers, and it achieves its goal. BREON MITCHELL, INDIANA UNIVERSITY ARTHUR MILLER. Salesman III Beijing. New York: Viking 1984. pp.vii, 254· $16.95. Few plays of the American theatre have been so successful, acclaimed, and performed worldwide as Arthur Mi11er's 1949 story of Willy Loman in Death oja Salesman. One is even a bit surprised to read on the dust jacket of this book that "on any given night, somewhere in the world an audience is watching Death oj a Salesman." Given the extraordinary appeal of the play as emblematic of [he American character, its transformation onto the stage of the Beijing People's Theatre in China, with a Chinese cast and crew, and with Arthur Miller directing, would seem to pose formidable obstacles. Mil1er has, of course, been around enough theatres to know how to direct his own play; but he did not speak Chinese, and within forty-eight short days, from March 21 to May 7, 1983, he needed not only to bring Death oJa Salesman to life on a foreign stage, but also to transcend what is quite possibly the largest gap between two cultures ever attempted in the history of the theatre. To compound matters even further, all of his directing comments had to be interpreted both literally and metaphorically through Ying Ruocheng, one of the actors in the Beijing company. Salesman in Beijing, Miller says in his Foreword, is based on "the log I kept each afternoon in the spring of 1983 between the morning rehearsals, from nine to noon, and the evening sessions from seven to ten." This is an interesting day-by-day account of 514 Book Reviews how a play. representing what is both a particular and general truth about American society. finally became a story representing two cultures, each fmding part of itself and its past through universality of thought, feeling, and language. Before leaving for China, Miller asked himself: "How could one hope to direct a cast without being able to talk to them?Worse yet, because it was more than thirty years since China had known even a rudimentary commercial civilization, how could I hope to create on stage the realities of a kind of life that had no existence in Chinese memories?" In the theatre, however, as in life and art, such questions come with the territory, and Miller soon plunged into long hours of rehearsals in a run-down and technically obsolete theatre. Would the Chinese audiences understand? This question...