Dramatizing Chinese Intellectuals of the Republican Era in Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek: Encoding Nostalgia in a Comedy of Ideas

Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek, one of the most influential Chinese plays to have garnered attention in recent years, serves as a reminder of the importance of campus theatre in the formation and development of modern Chinese spoken drama from the early twentieth century onwards. As an old-fashioned high comedy that features witty dialogues and conveys philosophical and political ideas, it stands in opposition to such other forms of theatre in China today as the extravagant, propagandistic ‘main melody’ plays, as well as the experimental theatre of images. This article argues that the play’s focus on Chinese intellectuals of the Republican era and their ideas encodes nostalgia both in its dramatic content and theatrical form: the former encodes nostalgia for the Republican era through a nuanced representation of Chinese intellectuals of that period, while the latter encodes nostalgia for orthodox spoken drama (huaju) in the form of a comedy of ideas. Yuan Li (first author) is Professor of English in the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She has published extensively on contemporary Chinese and Anglo-Irish drama, theatre, and cinema. Tim Beaumont (corresponding author) is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University. His research is primarily philosophical, and it is currently focused on the relationship between nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and contemporary multiculturalism.

Spoken Drama and Its Doubles: Thunderstorm 2.0 by Wang Chong and Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental

Thunderstorm 2.0 at the 2018 Under the Radar Festival introduced a modern Chinese classic to US audiences via radical adaptation and an assemblage of textual deconstruction, live-feed video, and Suzhou pingtan performance. It offered a timely interrogation of gender politics and deftly triangulated among tensions of live vs. mediated performance, folk traditions vs. modern drama, Chinese text vs. foreign context, and re-presenting a canonical play vs. flying “under the radar.”

Carmen and the Staging of Spain

Carmen and the Staging of Spain explores the Belle Époque fascination with Spanish entertainment that refashioned Bizet’s opera and gave rise to an international “Carmen industry.” Authors Michael Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz challenge the notion of Carmen as an unchanging exotic construct, tracing the ways in which performers and productions responded to evolving fashions for Spanish style from its 1875 premiere to 1915. Focusing on selected realizations of the opera in Paris, London, and New York, Christoforidis and Kertesz explore the cycles of influence between the opera and its parodies; adaptations in spoken drama, ballet and film; and the panorama of flamenco, Spanish dance, and musical entertainments. Their findings also uncover Carmen's dynamic interaction with issues of Hispanic identity against the backdrop of Spain's changing international fortunes. The Spanish response to this now most-Spanish of operas is illuminated by its early reception in Madrid and Barcelona, adaptations to local theatrical genres, and impact on Spanish composers of the time. A series of Spanish Carmens, from opera singers Elena Sanz and Maria Gay to the infamous music-hall star La Belle Otero, had a crucial influence on the interpretation of the title role. Their stories provide a fresh context for the book's reappraisal of leading Carmens of the era, including Emma Calvé and Geraldine Farrar.

Epic Transposed

The vexed problem of epic, equally detectable in the British and French theatrical traditions from the eighteenth century onwards, explains why epic had no place on the ‘tragic’ stage of the Comédie-Française during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Epic, it seems, could either be ‘low’ (so confined to the Théâtre Italien) or transported to the hyperreality of the operatic/ballet stages. This chapter examines one danced version, Gardel’s revolutionary ballet pantomime Télémaque dans l’île de Calypso (1790) in order to probe the fate of epic on the eighteenth-century stage. In the wake of the institutional divisions of the theatrical arts at the end of the seventeenth century, serious ‘spoken’ drama was restricted to a narrowly conceived ‘reality’ that precluded the ‘hyperreality’ of epic; and yet, paradoxically and chillingly, it was this ‘hyperreality’ that was increasingly providing a better reflection of the revolutionary actualities that were unfolding outside the theatre.

Dibdin and the Dilettantes

This chapter combines archival research with a broad range of biography and social history to shed light on a little understood aspect of Regency-era entertainment, the private theatrical, by bringing it into dialogue with the world of the professional theatre via Charles Dibdin—a man who, it is argued, was secretly implicated in the private culture which he satirized in his own public entertainments. Beginning by reconstructing the cross-class craze for private theatricals, it then moves to contemporary public criticism of the phenomenon, of which Dibdin’s own Private Theatricals formed a part. Analysis of Dibdin’s performance forms a central part of an argument that reads the faux-‘private’ actions of both Dibdin and the dilettantes as part of the irrevocable destabilization of the patent theatres’ monopoly on spoken drama.

There Is a World Elsewhere

Exploring the polarized opinions of the general public, scholars, and theatre professionals within China, and between China and Britain, on the Chinese Shakespeare Great General Kouliulan (Coriolanus)—which combines spoken drama with rock ’n’ roll—this chapter revisits many questions that have been raised in the debate over intercultural theatre. Why are theatre practitioners interested in producing an intercultural piece? How does it happen and what do artists do? Who benefits from doing intercultural work, and for whom is it intended? Is ‘process’ necessarily more important than ‘outcome’, and is there too much emphasis on ‘we’ and ‘others’ in the debate rather than on the created work at the end of the process? Lin Zhaohua’s Coriolanus serves as the case study in the chapter but other modern spoken drama productions and traditional song-dance theatre adaptations are also mentioned to offer readers a broader understanding of Shakespeare on the Chinese stage.

‘Spoken Drama (Huaju) with a Strong Chinese Flavour’: The Resurrection and Demise of Popular Spoken Drama (Tongsu Huaju) in Shanghai in the 1950s and Early 1960s

In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Shanghai, the remnant ofwenmingxi(civilized drama), China's first form of Western-style spoken drama, which had flourished in the 1900s and 1910s as a hybrid of Western spoken theatre and indigenous performance, experienced a brief resurrection and ultimate demise under the name oftongsu huaju(popular spoken drama). Considered until then as popular entertainment inferior to the officially recognized form of modern theatre,huaju(spoken drama), that adhered to Western realistic dramaturgy and performance,tongsu huajustaged a six-play festival in January 1957 thanks to liberal art policies, received a warm welcome in Beijing and other cities, and attracted the attention of somehuajuexperts who praised its affinity to indigenous performance, thus triggering a debate over its efficacy as a localized alternative tohuajufor the future of modern Chinese theatre. Using contemporary sources, this article examinestongsu huaju’s brief rise and fall in Shanghai, with a focus on its performances, the debate, the policy changes that decided the fate of China's first form of modern theatre, and the implications of its fate for the narrative of periodization in modern Asian theatre.

Hongkong-Speak

Cantonese has been used in “spoken drama” performances since the 1910s, but scripts (both original scripts and ones translated from other languages) were almost invariably written in standard Mandarin. Taking as its starting point the work of Rupert Chan, who was among the first to translate Western plays into colloquial Cantonese, this chapter examines some of the implications of the use of written Cantonese in contemporary Hong Kong. Of particular interest is the relationship between the use of written Cantonese and notions of local Hong Kong identity. As something new and unique to Hong Kong, Chan’s versions maintain an open-minded attitude vis-à-vis other cultural expressions and absorb, appropriate, and transform them, which is characteristic of the writing of Hong Kong identity.