Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism. By Henry Y.H. Zhao. [University of London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2000. 230 pp. ISBN 0–7286–0317–9.] The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian. Translated by Gilbert C.F. Fong. [Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999. xlii + 269 pp. ISBN 962–201–862–9.]

Extract

With Gao Xingjian's winning of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature and the controversy it generated, scholarship on Gao in English becomes crucial to understanding the landscape of Chinese cultural studies (both local and diasporan) during the 1980s and 1990s. Chinese spoken drama, severely under-studied and under-acknowledged in both Asian studies and theatre scholarship, has become a topic of sudden interest since the Nobel was bestowed on Gao last year. The relative paucity of English-language book-length sources on contemporary Chinese huaju (which include only four anthologies and even fewer single-author published manuscripts) means that studies that do reach the reading public potentially have tremendous impact on how this complex topic spanning the past century of Chinese cultural and political history is perceived. It is for this reason that I read Henry Zhao (Zhao Yiheng)'s Toward a Modern Zen Theatre with both considerable excitement and unexpected disappointment.