Children as theatre
Arthur A Miller’s Death of a Salesman, his magnum opus play, for which he won several prizes and international acclaim as a playwright of immense distinction, reinforces the visceral power of dreams and ambitions of parents. It does this while simultaneously offering a vision of parallel lives, a world separate from the choices and expectations of their children. Even as a fictionalised story, it shows us theatre as both a mirror of life, as well as a doorway to life. In my view, at its core, this is a compelling tale about a man, a family really, in need of sympathy and understanding for trying too hard to succeed, instead of receiving callousness and dismissal for failing! It is at once, a theatrical depiction of how life was lived, a disguised social commentary on modern life, and at the same time, a symbolic portrayal of others elsewhere, but just like us. That is often also how children are. And no matter how many children we raise (or how much theatre we see), every one of them yields a new meaning, relevance and understanding of life – just like theatre.
Children come to us parents, largely unprepared and thus compel an adjustment and alteration in our lives. Yet, the exquisite abidingness between their lives and ours harmonises the essential interplay between a child and a parent, each enriching the other, and each magnifying the completeness of life, from which all existence springs. As with theatre, children make us parents recognise ourselves. In fact, although they may not be an exact copy of us – like Biff and Happy as children in the aforementioned drama – they can be a rendition of both the facts of our existence and their import for us.
Children can make transformative changes from one version of their reality, into another; from newly born, to infants, to toddlers, to teenagers, to young adults and into full adults. They do all these things in the theatre of their lives, leading to some sort of performing art, if you will while providing us – their parents, communities and societies – with their lives’ design, costumes (from diapers to streetwear), occasion and unpredictability.
For children, there always exists the difficulty of the journey of growing up, of unavoidable changes to their physical bodies and intellects, and of big dreams by small, read young people. Against this, they must daily reckon with the sun intent on setting behind them – with high unemployment, diminished social mobility, limited opportunities, a fixation on earnings rather than occupations, catastrophes, etc. - and not rising to them as it probably did with their parents. This is a continuous challenge of their lives and future, actually, an account of the world they live in now. Notwithstanding this, children will often be self-conscious and hold tightly to the belief that their path to a better life for themselves is lined with their individual talent, application and capital – indeed, the building blocks of theatre that are deeply and honestly real.
Children are often like us, but may be different from their parents; they will also sometimes deviate from the best-laid plans for them, or play fast and loose with them: a fact confirmed most convincingly by Linda, the attentive mother and wife in this play. In any event, it is often through children that we realise that circumstance shapes one’s behaviour. In real life, what we as parents call plans, dreams and ambitions are actually a kind of shorthand or evocative colouring, to a successful life we wish for our children. Life is made up of these things, after all.
Of course, sometimes parents live vicariously through their children – seeing in their children’s success or failure, their own success or failure – or the burdensome expectation that their children ought to succeed where their parents failed. In the abovementioned creative gem, to their parents, the children are the detail and expression of this delicate dance with dreams, ambitions, choices and expectations, as well as the tragedy of their un-fulfillment. Additionally, in their children, parents may find the mystery of their lives and the reflection of their own (in) sufficiency. Thus, out of the (in) adequacy of their parents’ lives may come the theatre of their children.
Like theatre, one of the in-articulated values of children is how they shine a light into life generally; how children portray their societies from the inside of their lives and project it to the gates of their homes; and the difficulty of them being born from little beginnings and later, but trying to be everything, for themselves and their societies. Actually, with the hindsight of close observation and reflection, this above-mentioned ‘likely story’ can be perceived as an embodiment of the experience of oneself, of disappointment and reality, which we must all embrace in order to feel the intensity of our existence, hopes and dreams.
In March 1999, on the 50th anniversary of Death of a Salesman, and Broadway, we watched Brian Dennehy, as Willy Loman, the ‘salesman’, bring unbidden tears, sniffing and silent sobbing to us, through his grand performance in Miller’s said timeless drama. I did not know it then, but now I think I know it, and you probably know it too, that children can be a site where their joy and pain commingle those of their parents’ joy and pain. In fact, for better or for worse, children can equally be a theatre of their unpredictability, our vulnerability and society’s expectations: a moving and growing stage performance from one time to another, a hard lesson for now, and an everlasting education!