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Agitation and Anaesthesia: Aspects of Chinese Theatre Today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Roger Howard
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Extract

Few people deny the intimate inter-relationship in new China of culture on the one hand, and the stage of the revolution on the other. Yet I do not think it has always been made clear why it is theatre that has been the main art for expressing that relationship.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , October 1976 , pp. 53 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1976

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References

Notes

1. The inter-relationship has been well stated by Scott, A. C. in Literature and the Arts In Twentieth Century China (New York, Doubleday, 1963)Google Scholar and partly investigated by Fokkema, D. W. in Literary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence 1956–1960 (The Hague, Mouton, 1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar So far as it affects the theatre, it has been implied, rather than studied in detail, in Mackerras's, ColinThe Chinese Theatre in Modern Times (London, Thames and Hudson, 1975)Google Scholar and Snow's, Lois WheelerChina on Stage (New York, Random House, 1972).Google Scholar The present article is the result of inquiries made during two years' research in China (1972–4) for my monograph Contemporary Chinese Theatre (Brussels, La Renaissance du Livre, 1976Google Scholar; Hong Kong, Heinemann, forthcoming).

2. See particularly Theatre Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4, 10–12 1971Google Scholar; and Performance, March-April 1973.

3. I discuss some of these problems in my introduction to Slaughter Night and other plays (London, Calder & Boyars, 1971)Google Scholar and in my essays in Culture and Agitation: Theatre Documents (London, Action Books, 1972).Google Scholar

4. Charges of stereotyping are touched on by Lan, Chu in ‘A Decade of Revolution in Peking Opera’, Peking Review, no. 31, 2 08 1974.Google Scholar The more radical criticism was conveyed to me by students at Peking University during discussions I had there in 1974.

5. Especially in On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People.

6. Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed, Schram, Stuart, ed. (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1974) p. 283.Google Scholar

7. Bulletin of the New China News Agency (London, 23 03 1976).Google Scholar

8. Chinese Literature, no. 10, 1972.Google Scholar I stress here a side of Song of the Dragon River that I undervalued in my analysis of this opera in Performance.

9. See, for example, my description of the ‘remoulding’ content of Storm Warning and Half a Basket of Peanuts in Gambit, vol. 6, no. 24, 1974.Google Scholar I have treated this subject at greater length in Contemporary Chinese Theatre.

10. Kwangming Daily, 17 02 1974.Google Scholar

11. I have developed this line of thinking further in the last section of my biography Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese People (London, Allen & Unwin, 1976).Google Scholar