The Paper's reporter Pan Yu
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman has been hailed as "the greatest postwar American play." Completed in 1949, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award, and the New York Critics Award in the same year, making it the first play in history to win three major theater awards at the same time. In China, this work has its special significance. In 1983, Arthur Miller came to China from the United States and personally directed the play at the People's Art Theater in Beijing, translated by Ying Ruocheng and co-starred with performing artists such as Zhu Lin and Zhu Xu, becoming a reserved play for Beijing Renyi. Since then, Beijing Renyi rearranged the play in 2012 directed by Li Liuyi. But in the decades between here, Arthur Miller, a world-class playwright, rarely performed in China.
The crew set makeup photos
This year, the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center gathered a strong lineup of Lv Liang, Song Yining, Han Xiuyi, Gu Xin, Lan Haimeng, Liu Peng and other strong lineups, directed by director Lin Yi, and rehearsed a new version of "Death of a Salesman". Because of the audience's strong expectations for the work and cast, the first round of 14 performances of the show was sold out shortly after it was ticketed. On August 7, the play will be officially staged at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center.
"Death of a Salesman" has been performed more than 700 times on Broadway, making Arthur Miller a household playwright in the United States. Arthur Miller himself described the work this way: "People ask me what the Death of a Salesman is a story about, and I say: It's a story about the death of a salesman. Yes, it's hard for me to describe this work in general terms, because Death of a Salesman has a lot to say: it's about America, it's about the salesman, it's about the economic situation; it's also about family, it's about life, and it's too hard for me to try to define it in one sentence. It's a story about love, a story about love between a father and a son. When I talked to different actors about The Death of a Salesman, I said: Everyone likes Willie in this show, except Willie himself. I think Death of a Salesman might be a story about losing love and finding it again. ”
Lu Liang plays willie, a salesman, in the play
Song Yining
And this time, Lu Liang, who played the salesman Willy in the play, is also one of the important promoters of this drama. His affection and love for this play has run through his entire actor's career, and his understanding of it has changed with the development of the times and his own growth.
"I read this script for the first time 40 years ago as a beginner theatre player with reverence. As I grew older, my thoughts gradually matured, and I paid more and more attention to social issues. I gradually had a stronger and clearer understanding of the psychology of people under the social environment and social form of the United States reflected by Arthur Miller, and I felt that it was close to us. This play is very worth rehearsing now, many details in the play and today there are countless places that can be connected, I believe that this work will be universally recognized and resonated with today's audience. ”
Director Lin Yi
Lin Yi and Lu Liang, who directed "The Death of a Salesman", have collaborated on many works. Since graduating from the Department of Theater Directing in 2004 and working at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, Lin Yi has begun a career of both "directing" and "acting". As an actress, she participated in many of the translation plays on the show. As a director, her works have always been associated with Agatha Christie, and she has directed more than ten Agatha works in more than ten years, almost becoming the "first person" to direct domestic Agatha dramas.
However, rehearsing Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" undoubtedly means a challenge for Lin Yi. She prepared many desks for the work, studied all arthur Miller papers she could find, and even studied the American society and history covered in the play. On the wall of the rehearsal hall, a contrast between the socio-economic development of the United States and the narrative chronology of the "Willy Lohman" family from 1868 to 1945 is very conspicuous, which is also drawn by Lin Yi after in-depth research.
In the face of countless versions of the interpretation of countless troupes around the world, how to interpret and present this textbook-level play today, Lin Yi gave her own thoughts and answers in an interview.
【Dialogue】
The Paper: How will you interpret "The Death of a Salesman" in your re-arrangement today?
Lin Yi: "The Death of a Salesman" is a work that has been compiled into textbooks, and it seems to have been known to everyone, and the well-known theme of this play is often "the shattering of the American Dream".
Frankly, a lot of people, including the audience, including me, are initially influenced by the concept of the "American Dream," and you don't seem to see the story itself, the script is "mythical" on some level.
But for me, this play doesn't just show us a broken dream, it says more. From a modern perspective, it also involves many common problems in modern society, such as social pressures, the family of origin, intimacy, parent-child relationships, self-perception, identity, behavioral disorders, etc., each of which explains more clearly how this dream is broken.
What the audience can see most directly, and the actors most directly perform, is actually a story about love, between father and son, between husband and wife, brother and friend. The story of how they lose love and find love but in the end they can't save each other. In fact, the whole family is loving "Willie" in their own way, and only "Willie" does not love himself. This is the relatively personal part of the show.
In the play, "Willie" and his eldest son "Beeve" both do their best to give each other love, but the question is, why don't they let the other person really feel love? Perhaps because love is materialized in a certain environment, no matter how powerful the economic development and urbanization of society, it is difficult for individuals not to be driven by the environment, position and personal desires, which will cover your eyes, make you unable to see yourself, and you may not see others clearly, and you may lose the ability to love and the ability to feel love.
The Paper: How do you understand the value of Arthur Miller's script today?
Lin Yi: Arthur Miller's work is really too easy to wake people up. He was a very good observer. He is not the kind of playwright whose life is very bad, or who has a lot of special emotions to express, he is a sober observer.
What he shows us is the state of a most ordinary person under the crushing wheel of the times. What kind of hope he was holding, what kind of dream he was dreaming. In that era, what Willie believed in the "American Dream" was a promise, a promise to all Americans that life could be a better place if that person had the opportunity and willingness to work hard, regardless of their background or social class. But Arthur Miller, with his keen eye, saw that some people, no matter how hard they worked, couldn't achieve their dreams. He knows that not everyone has an equal chance of success. What does it mean to live in a society where promises a lot but nothing is guaranteed? This is the question that Miller asked.
Now, we have more opportunities, more retreats and more open minds, but this play allows us to stop and see if there is a shadow of Willie Lohman who is "selling" and "selling" himself. Living in a highly urbanized society, any ordinary person can see more clearly the dream that we carry and experience.
In fact, in the early days of desk preparation, I could not find exactly what Arthur Miller actually wanted to tell us, and although the academic article was very clear, I could not produce the same reason. Late one night, due to a series of changes and tears in my own life at what stage, suddenly I developed a feeling of exhaustion that I had never felt before, a tiredness that could not be unloaded. When I felt this indescribable exhaustion myself, I suddenly found the fulcrum of creation. See the ordinary people that Arthur Miller has illuminated for us who are tired and carrying the weight of an era.
The Paper: How do you understand the salesman in the play, that is, the character of Willie Roman?
Lin Yi: I don't want to treat Willie Roman as a "little person", in my opinion, he is an ancient Greek tragic hero.
Yes, in fact, Arthur Miller himself wrote so, he should be a tragic hero. At the beginning of reading the script summary, you will feel that in the face of the wheel of history, small people can be stubborn, and small people can survive in the cracks. But the hero will carry a certain unrealistic yearning, with a certain incomprehension or dissatisfaction with reality, he wants to break, he wants to fight, he has to contend with what he is in front of, unwilling to compromise, with a good wish. Until he found that all methods did not work, he used the most costly method, that is, suicide, to complete the meaning of his life, and identity, to bloom the last fireworks of his life.
As Nietzsche said, life is meaningless, but the process of finding meaning in life is meaningful.
In preparing for this play, I read many papers written by Arthur Miller himself, who had a special complex for ancient Greek tragedy, and who had a very strong desire for why ordinary people could not be called heroes, so he was going to write about an ordinary person of the tragic heroic style that he observed.
The Paper: Teacher Lu Liang's role as Willie Roman this time makes people very much look forward to it, is his understanding of the problem of "tragic hero" consistent with yours?
Lin Yi: Exactly the same. But the problem I often tear up with him is that I think the character may be presented more than ever less sadly, at least he doesn't want to be sad or unwilling to be sad. It is inevitable that he will look tired when faced with real life. I prefer to present a hero directly, a tired and childlike glowing fight. Maybe because of age and experience, or because actors need to rely on their own bodies to create. So it's only natural that actors sometimes show more of the character's despair of not being able to fight against fate.
In fact, these two points are not contradictory, in fact, this is a metaphysical and metaphysical difference. Because Willie's despair is inevitable, but his outlook on life values are very sharp and incomplete, so he will fight and fight in behavior. If he had matured and thought it through, Willie Roman might not have been a hero and could have lived a good life, right?
Perhaps the audience imagines that this drama is also the tragic fate of a "small person" (I prefer to call him an "ordinary person"), and I want to pay more attention to expressing the state of his tragic fate, but the process of wrestling with the tragic fate in the last 24 hours of his life. He searched desperately for the meaning of life in his memories, but he did not grasp it at all, and the reason was precisely because his starting point was wrong, he saw the unreal world. As the British philosopher Russell said, when a person has a wrong view of the world, he will present an indomitable despair.
The Paper: What will be the presentation style of this play?
Lin Yi: The style of the script itself is very clear —it relies on the stream of consciousness generated by the memories and imaginations in Willie's brain to narrate. I would most like to explicitly present this stream of consciousness formation in style, which comes entirely from Willie's mind. So when he starts to reminisce, I want the whole theater to be his "mind." So it is necessary to break the "illusion" that we have used to establish in the theater, and to establish a certain poetry that belongs to the play. This poetry is not only beautiful, but also cruel, and it is sublimated and refined into certain emotions of life.
The Paper: I heard that you have put a lot of effort into the translation of the script this time?
Lin Yi: Yes, before we officially started rehearsals, we re-examined the script together.
This is also my habit in the past when I rehearsed Agatha plays, and the scripts often had to go through one first translation and two proofreadings. Among them, the first translation can understand the drama, first give a translation that meets the characteristics of the script, then there will be a translation that is relatively hard in English, give a proofreading of the faithful original text, and finally I get the translation against the English original, and finally repeat it when making the desk, to ensure that the presentation on the stage is in line with the script and what we want.
In fact, the translator this time is very good, he himself studied drama at Columbia University, and his research direction is "Arthur Miller". It is also because of "Arthur Miller" that we are extra cautious this time. What we want to solve as much as possible is actually the problem that many translated dramas have.
For example, we Chinese emphasize state more, while English emphasizes action more - "he runs fast" If translated as "he runs fast", when this action is expressed very strongly, it becomes a state. If the actor goes along in search of subtext, perhaps the direction of the performance is completely different. There are also some languages that we would like it to be more in tune with the language of drama. For example, "pull yourself together", the normal translation should be "control yourself", but we hope to find more vivid language, so we "break" the canonical translation, using words to proofread this sentence as "clean up yourself".
Arthur Miller's language is much harder to grasp than Agatha Christie's. Because most of the classes written by Christie are in the upper middle class, the language is more complete, and the translation into Chinese can also be relatively complete. But Arthur Miller is an American writer who has his own language habits and enjoys creating new phrases, phrases, and sentence patterns and sentences that normal and simple translations can't be translated. If these things have not been unified, then it is very likely that something will come out of the sense and context that Arthur Miller was originally trying to express. When the actor is completely guided according to the lines, to shape the character, to find the basis, it is likely that there will be a great deviation. Sometimes Willie Roman is still in a state of relative hope and encouragement, and if there is a deviation in the translation, it may become a very negative state.
Many lines in the script and even many words have been omitted, many expressions you will feel that you can't understand at once, you must contact many parts of the front, find a buried foreshadowing, etc., you know what this sentence actually means. So this time we spent a lot of time on the script to study the adjustment together.
The Paper: The Works that you have been familiar with in the past are almost all Agatha's suspense dramas, is this creation very different from before?
Lin Yi: It's so different.
Agatha is a relatively more plot thing, more storytelling. The characters being crushed by society and life is not the point, just the background. Then in this story, each viewer may get a completely different experience. Some people come to see the story, some are frightened, some people come to find clues and clues, and some people get some thoughts about human nature after reading it.
But I don't think audiences will have too many different ideas about Arthur Miller's work, at least not so inconsistently. People who look at stories purely will see love and will produce sympathy, and these love and sympathy will cause them to think, they will begin to reflect, like looking in the mirror.
That's what Arthur Miller called it — the difference between tragedy and pathos. If an event is only sad and sympathetic, it can only be called a "sad" event, not a "tragedy", let alone a "tragic hero". Tragedy should bring us to think, and the "tragic hero" should use his fate to enlighten us. At the same time, Miller also told us in the conscience of his playwright that there is no way out. The way out is there, it depends on whether you choose or not.
Editor-in-charge: Cheng Yu
Proofreader: Liu Wei