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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
In China, Western theatre-goers often have the feeling that they are sitting in a boulevard theatre. At most the higher moral level and a certain didactic quality, together, with political seriousness, seem to distinguish the melodramas, comedies and thrillers from the popular plays of the commercial theatre at home. Reflecting on the different character of Chinese theatre, the European viewer quickly falls back on adjectives like ‘backward’, ‘underdeveloped’, even if he or she would justifiably reject such eurocentric judgments in an economic or political context. I should like to try not just to describe modern Chinese drama but to suggest some historical and social reasons for its specific characteristics.
1. Most of the information in this article derives from personal experience, visits to the theatre, discussions with theatre people in various Chinese cities in the course of my four year stay there from 1977–81. I would like once again to thank my Chinese friends without whose help this article could not have been written.
2. Terms like ‘despotic system’ and, later, ‘feudal-bureaucratic’ are used here in full knowledge of the fact that they are provisional and merely indicate the direction of future attempts at clarification, yet without being able to anticipate them. The main intention is to stress the differences in respect of European feudalism and European history.
3. Shi, Hu: ‘Yibushengzhuyi’ (Ibsenism), in Xin Qingnian (New Youth), vol. 4, Nr. 6, 1918, p. 502Google Scholar, quoted in Eberstein, B. ed.: Moderne Stücke aus China, Frankfurt 1980, p. 9.Google Scholar
4. For example, Cao Yu's plays, Ba Jin's novel Family, Ding Ling's The diary of Sophia.
5. Zedong, Mao: Selected Works, Beijing 1965, vol. 3, pp. 69 ff.Google Scholar
6. An exhaustive description of this theatre can be found in Prušek, Jaroslav: Die Literaturn des befreiten China und ihre Volkstraditionen, Prague 1955.Google Scholar
7. Hence the reproach to Lao She in the criticism of his masterpiece Teahouse, as he himself relates: ‘In Reply to some Questions about Teahouse’, in Chinese Literature, Nr. 12, 1979, pp. 12–15Google Scholar. Against the background of such very typical criticism, the play was removed from the repertoire in 1963.
8. In relationship to this whole problem, see my essay: ‘Brecht hinter der großen Mauer. Zu seiner Rezeption in der Volksrepublik China’ in Brecht-Jahrbuch 1980, Frankfurt 1981, pp. 43–137.Google Scholar
9. Published in Chinese Literature, Nr. 4, 1979, pp. 3–56.Google Scholar
10. See Zuolin, Huang ‘Mei Lanfang, Stanislavsky, Brecht – a Study in Contrasts’ in Wu Zuguang, Huang Zuolin and Mei Shaowu: Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang, Beijing 1981, pp. 14–29Google Scholar; also, Tatlow, Antony and Wong, Tak-wai ed.: Brecht and East Asian Theatre, Hong Kong 1982.Google Scholar
11. Xuexiyu tansuo, Nr. 1, 1981Google Scholar, excerpted in Peking Review, Nr. 29, 1981Google Scholar, which advances the thesis that the main contradiction in contemporary social morality does not exist between bourgeois and communist, but between feudal and communist morality. The struggle against bourgeois morality positively encouraged feudal morality, i.e. personality cult, bureaucratism, patriarchal system etc …
12. Ruixiang, Su in Penmin Xiju, Nr. 9, 1982.Google Scholar
13. Marx, Karl: Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Berlin, 1953, p. 134.Google Scholar
14. Ibid., p. 79.
15. Marx, Karl: ‘Einleitung’, in Marx/Engels: Werke, Berlin, 1956 ff, vol. 13, p. 615.Google Scholar