Introduction
‘This evening, I saw a play, composed in a kind of Esperanto of theatre language, that brought China and the whole world a bit closer to myself.’ These lines were written by playwright Akın Sipal after having watched a performance of Lin Zhaohua’s production The negotiator (Shuike), which had been invited to the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in 2011.Footnote 1 In the opening of his short text ‘The globalized negotiator’ Sipal admits that he had expected something else from a Chinese performance and that this play ‘disturbs my illusions of foreignness’.Footnote 2 Summarizing the theme of the play—a story about Confucius’s disciple Zigong set in a China that now lies some 2,500 years in the past—Sipal goes on: ‘The question here is one of morality: How far can Zigong go in order to protect his own country? This is a central question of humanity, of politics. Also here in Europe, also in Germany.’Footnote 3
Although the topic of this article is the play written by Li Jing about Lu Xun, Daxiansheng,Footnote 4 I have begun it with these quotations from Akın Sipal because contemporary Chinese plays are rarely read as cosmopolitan reflections on global, contemporary situations. To read them in this way might seem like a very banal task. It is well known, after all, that theatre and literature can be understood anywhere and any time. Moreover, modern Chinese theatre has, right from its beginnings, been a cosmopolitan project, or an enterprise determined by critical cosmopolitanism.Footnote 5 However, in recent years, such opportunities for cultural encounter as that offered to and by the production of The negotiator staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg have not been enjoyed by very many Chinese plays and productions.Footnote 6 Important research, indeed, has been published on the various international, transnational, and cosmopolitan pasts of Chinese theatre.Footnote 7 But the fact is that only very few theatre people outside China have worked with dramatic texts written in contemporary China.Footnote 8 Furthermore, not many scholars have posed the question of how to translate a Chinese play for non-Chinese audiences, for example, a European audience. When I speak of ‘translating’ here I not only mean the translation of the words but also the translation of other aspects of theatre, such as humour, for example, or intertextuality, or an attitude of critical cosmopolitanism.Footnote 9 In my opinion, all of these are fundamental aspects of Li Jing’s work. Perhaps, to some extent, the focus of my article is similar to what Catherine Diamond refers to when she writes about the ‘bi-cultural dramaturge’ who, in her opinion, has the role of an ‘arch-weaver who makes sure that all the strands are picked up’. In Diamond’s view, such ‘bi-cultural dramaturges’ are characterized by the fact that they can work on many aspects of theatre at once: ‘If involved in translating the script, their linguistic knowledge aids them in being conduits for conveying cultural connotations to both sides’.Footnote 10 In the case of Daxiansheng, one might argue, it is not just about connotations but also about contexts.
In his piece ‘Can Ma Ji handle this?’ (Schafft es Ma Ji?)—an allusion to Angela Merkel’s famous dictum ‘We can handle this’ (Wir schaffen das)—Michael Gissenwehrer has shown how Huang Weiruo’s play The monster land (Luocha guo) can work perfectly well as a reflection on migration and integration in the European context.Footnote 11 Dramaturgically similar to the The negotiator, The monster land takes as its basis and point of departure an old Chinese story: in this case ‘Luocha haishi’ from the Strange tales from the Liaozhai Studio, written by Pu Songling.Footnote 12 However, by adapting and rewriting it, Huang Weiruo renders it abstract and open to different interpretations in the context of contemporary times.
I do not wish to propose here such a direct strategy for the staging of Li Jing’s play Daxiansheng. However, what I would like to show in this article is that the works of Li Jing—one of the most celebrated contemporary Chinese female playwrights,Footnote 13 who often uses traditional Chinese stories and historical characters as material for her playsFootnote 14—actually need to be explored in the context of contemporary reflections about multiple forms of belonging, about new senses of self and senses of responsibility, in the global world, all of these being interconnected within the field of cosmopolitan theatre and of new cosmopolitanism studies more broadly.
I believe that one way of accessing the cosmopolitan perspective on Li Jing’s texts can be through a focus on dramaturgy or, in other words, on the ‘methods of relating audiences to performative events’.Footnote 15 Thus, I will attempt to show here how Daxiansheng in fact takes such a well-known representative figure of the culture of modern China as Lu Xun and displaces him from his familiar environment, relocating him within a context made up of all kinds of new texts. In addition, I will attempt to show how the characters are constructed as multiple figures at once, fragmented and reassembled as they move through continuously changing forms and atmospheres. Finally, the present analysis will also show how the author inscribes herself into the play and how the work’s audiences are likewise invited to participate in this theatrical project.
In order to discuss Daxiansheng as a piece of cosmopolitan theatre I borrow a series of concepts both from the work of Yana Meerzon and from that of Erika Fischer-Lichte.Footnote 16 For Meerzon’s study on the cosmopolitan theatre in times of hyper-modern nomads, a central figure to be considered here is the ‘divided self’—that is, an individual whose ‘sense of self’ is determined by ‘the act of encounter’.Footnote 17 Fischer-Lichte has proposed the concept of ‘interweaving’ as a useful perspective for studying contemporary performance cultures. She states that the terminology of ‘interculturality’ is no longer adequate, since the notion of the intercultural ‘assumes that cultures are hermetically sealed, homogeneous entities—once Japanese, always Japanese; once European, always European. But this is not the case.’Footnote 18 Neither is this the case for Li Jing’s texts.
Of great inspiration too has been Andreea Chirita’s essay on Li Jing’s Comedy of Qin (Qinguo xiju), in which she shows how this play can be read in the context of contemporary Chinese society. In her essay Chirita writes: ‘Li’s own dramatic work is inscribed within the larger context of Chinese postmodernism and its intrinsic globalizing ecologies that mix contemporary global theatre aesthetics with pre-existent forms of Chinese intercultural theatre to explore local realities.’Footnote 19 In my text, I propose to follow a path which complements that taken by Chirita’s piece. That is to say, I hope to show that Li Jing’s text works with local material while at the same time addressing issues of a global dimension. It manages to do this by making use of dramaturgical devices that disconnect Chinese history from familiar images, explore new abstract figures, and experiment with translating these images into new contexts.
As might still be perceptible at some points in the following text, my first approach to Daxiansheng was as a translator. While working on translating the text, my question became one of how to recreate the fragmented and reassembled characters, of how to translate the contrastive modes—specifically the modes of comedy and grotesque in their contrast with the realistic scenes—of how to work with intertextual references of all kinds in translation, and of how to recreate resonances with contemporary situations. In short, my problem became that of how to translate the ‘broken mirror’ that Li Jing mentions in her notes about the composition.Footnote 20 When engaging on this translation of the text, I conducted some conversations with Li Jing herself. I will bring in, from time to time, some of the material from these conversations.Footnote 21
Daxiansheng was Li Jing’s first dramatic text. As she points out, she originally wrote it for Lin Zhaohua. In the end, however, the ‘dadao’ did not stage the play, with an earlier version of the text published in 2013 in the journal Tianya and a later version of it as a book in 2015.Footnote 22 In 2016, the independent director Wang Chong finally staged the play at the National Theatre of China, where Zhao Lixin starred as Lu Xun in the main role.Footnote 23
The analysis developed over the following pages begins with some remarks on the general arrangement of the story itself. The second part addresses the great variety of all kinds of texts interwoven in this play. A third part, on the construction of characters, will show the multiplicity of relationships displayed in it. The fourth part describes the contrastive modes and atmospheres evoked in the text. The last part shows how the text works on establishing a relationship between play, author, and audience.
Displacing an icon
Li Jing’s Daxiansheng is a play about the celebrated writer Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature.Footnote 24 However, the Lu Xun who appears in this play is far from being a familiar figure. Although some characters in the play bear the names of historical persons from Lu Xun’s time, or of fictional characters from his works, the way in which both of these are represented here is very different from the ways in which they have traditionally been represented.Footnote 25 During recent decades, a number of theatre plays and movies have been made either based on Lu Xun’s life or adapting certain of his works, and sometimes meshing both of these aspects. Li Jing’s Daxiansheng, however, proposes both a very unfamiliar characterization of Lu Xun and a completely new way of looking at his fictional characters.
The basic structure of the play is provided by the dramaturgy of a journey. It opens on 19 October 1936—the early morning of the day on which Lu Xun died. In that very moment, two heavenly messenger-like characters appear and declare that it is their task to take Lu Xun, or his soul, in a suitcase—an important travel object—into paradise or into hell. What follows are a number of encounters between Lu Xun and people or moments from his life. He meets important women, such as his mother Lu Rui; his wife, Zhu An, to whom he had been joined according to traditional arranged marriage practices; and his lover Xu Guangping. He also encounters some of the most famous intellectuals of his time, such as his brother Zhou Zuoren and Hu Shi. In addition, he meets characters who do not bear the names of historical persons but might serve to remind us of them, such as the Young Man in Black Clothes who appears sometimes to take on the form of Rou Shi, or the Young Man Who Never Smiles who reminds us of people from the League of Left Wing Writers. Lu Xun also encounters characters from his own writings such as Ah Q (from The true story of Ah Q) or Runtu (from the story Hometown). Finally, he also encounters ‘other selves’, or other parts of himself, such as the image into which he is transformed after his death. We may say, then, that, rather than by a clear storyline, the action of the play is determined by sequences of encounters. After having transformed into a series of other characters, the heavenly messenger-like characters reappear, announcing that the final destination of the journey—the intellectuals’ paradise—has been reached. However, even this supposed final destination turns out to be no more than a transitory space. After a short and conflictual meeting with other inhabitants of this ‘paradise’, Lu Xun finds himself expelled, cast out in front of its gate. In the closing scene, the play returns to its beginning. It is still the early morning of 19 October 1936, and now Lu Xun is finally allowed to die.
With the one exception of the moment of his death, Lu Xun is not depicted, in this play, in any scene which those conversant with Lu Xun’s life and work would be likely to recognize as familiar. Not even scenes that feature encounters with other famous historical personalities, such as Hu Shi or Zhou Zuoren, convey this sense of familiarity. Ah Q too—Lu Xun’s most famous fictional character—has been translated here into a series of characters: characters who would most likely not have been recognized by the audience as representing Ah Q at all, had Li Jing not given them this name. Lu Xun, in other words, is displaced out of familiar environments, histories, and contexts. Other historical personalities as well, such as Zhou Zuoren, Hu Shi, along with others of Lu Xun’s fictional characters, are likewise transplanted into different contexts. When reflecting on her approach to writing a play about Lu Xun, Li Jing pointed out that she was aiming to find a special way of understanding Lu Xun in contemporary times: ‘I wanted him to become a broken mirror which could at the same time reflect our history and our present day.’Footnote 26 Borrowing the words of Yana Meerzon, I propose to think about Li Jing’s Lu Xun as a ‘cosmopolitan subject’, who ‘can stand outside singular locations and traditions, interrogating themselves and the world’.Footnote 27
Interweaving texts
Li Jing’s Daxiansheng is not the adaptation of an existing biography of Lu Xun. It was, however, inspired by the reading of a wide variety of biographies and books, traces of which can, from time to time, be detected in the play. The play is not, indeed, the straightforward dramatic translation of one or more short stories written by Lu Xun. It nonetheless features some famous characters and direct text passages from Lu Xun’s writing. Daxiansheng does not adopt any clear and distinct theatrical form, but, as Li Jing points out, this open structure is the result of long research about how best to express all her ideas. I argue that the concept of ‘interweaving’, as proposed by Fischer-Lichte, can be helpful in thinking about this dramaturgical aspect, since, some ‘strands’, some ‘threads’, might be visible to some people. Considered as a whole, however, the work is a new ‘piece of cloth’. Nonetheless, it also shares another characteristic mentioned by Fischer-Lichte: ‘the process of weaving is not necessarily smooth or straightforward’.Footnote 28 Li Jing has written a lot about the difficulties of composing the text. Not least among the evidence for this are the many text fragments and scenes which were, in the end, not included in the final version of the play.Footnote 29
When asked about her preparation of the production, Li Jing replied:
Do you know the book One man’s battle cry (Yige ren de nahan 一个人的呐喊), by Zhu Zheng (朱正)? For me, this is the best biography of Lu Xun. It contains a lot of sources and materials. This is why it is so special and very helpful. It does not have so many interpretations and discussions […] Since we’re speaking about sources, there are in fact two book series that have been very important for me. One is the Collected retrospectives on Lu Xun (Huiwang Lu Xun congshu 回望鲁迅丛书) edited by Sun Yu. It contains about ten books. The other one is called Reminiscences of Lu Xun (Lu Xun huiyi lu 鲁迅回忆录), which comprises six books. There is, indeed, some overlap between them but these two series represent, for me, the basic knowledge that one has to acquire about Lu Xun. Besides the Collected Works of Lu Xun (Lu Xun quanji 鲁迅全集) themselves, these books have been the most important ones for me […] In addition, I have read a number of biographies of people around Lu Xun. Zhou Zuoren’s biography for instance. These have been very important for me, too. Besides that, I could mention Leo Ou-Fan Lee’s book Voices from the iron house, and certain studies by scholars from Japan; also an early collection of works by American and European scholars from the 1980s. These writings were very important for me as well, because they helped me to develop my thoughts about Lu Xun. There is another book by a Japanese scholar, Itō Toramaru, Lu Xun und eschatology. I found this book very interesting. It draws a comparison between Lu Xun and the Old Testament. But in fact, these scholars who work directly on Lu Xun have not been that important for me. More important has been a Russian theologian and philosopher. His name is Nikolai Berdyaev. He actually inspired me and suggested to me how I could look at Lu Xun […]Footnote 30
Likewise, the relationships with theatrical works discoverable in Li Jing’s piece are of many different kinds. In her notes about how she composed the text, Li Jing mentions a number of biographical plays that she studied in order to find a structure for her play. Here, she cites Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Büchner’s Danton’s death, Strindberg’s Master Olof, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. She concluded, however, that Lu Xun’s case was different from all of these.Footnote 31 Eventually, as she said, she found her main inspiration in texts that did not have much to do with biography:
At this time I had two models in particular: one was A dream play by Strindberg; this work taught me how to give form to a ‘dream’. The other one was The mission by Heiner Müller; this work taught me how to break the boundaries of concrete time and space, and how to transform complex thoughts into theatrical actions located outside any concrete time or space and filled with suspense.Footnote 32
As she further revealed to me:
Heiner Müller’s play Hamlet machine inspired me a lot as well, not so much in terms of thought as in terms of dramatic form. He put into practice a way of displaying thought on stage. When showing the thoughts of his characters on stage, he uses some strange, absurd, obscure ways to let them express what they think. This is actually a way of letting their souls speak, both in monologues and dialogues. This highly abstract spiritual world of his characters gave me a lot of inspiration.Footnote 33
As can be seen from these remarks, Daxiansheng eschews imposing formal unity on the different levels of dramatic structure and theatrical conception. Rather, unity is built through the rethinking and interweaving of a multiplicity of traditions and texts, some deriving from the theatre, others deriving from the biographical tradition, and so on.
Likewise, no attempt is made here to weave Lu Xun’s works into a single theatrical form; rather, these works are interwoven in fragments and images, translated into new situations and contexts. Ah Q, for instance, Lu Xun’s most famous fictional character, appears at several different moments of the play. In the first part, alongside other characters from Lu Xun’s fictional works, such as Wang Hu, Runtu, and Xiao D, Ah Q is one of the carriage-bearers who transports the sedan with Zhu An inside it. In the course of the play, these characters transform into a figuration representing the ‘masses’, or the ‘people’. In the last part of the play, portraying Lu Xun in paradise, we see that Ah Q has transformed yet again: this time into an underdog of the world of today. I will discuss this scene in the final section of this article.
Daxiansheng also touches on texts of Lu Xun’s that have not previously been explored in the theatre. One example of this is the recurrent image of the chair, which is brought up several times and in different scenes of the play: Lu Xun fights, on stage, over and over again, with a chair into which he seems somehow to have grown, or rather, which has grown inside Lu Xun’s body. He says to Zhu An that, for him, she is ‘a chair with a missing leg’; his mother Lu Rui sits in the chair; the Man in the Yellow Robe sits in the chair and other characters—Ah Q among them—are obliged to carry him around in the chair; in the end, Lu Xun burns the chair. In the play, the chair appears to be associated with the notion of a position of power, but in very different variations. This image of the chair can be traced back to Lu Xun’s own writing: namely, a zawen essay written in 1931—a text that has not hitherto been explored in theatrical works at all. In the essay Some glimpses of Shanghai’s culture, published in this same year, Lu Xun writes: ‘This situation clearly demonstrates that revolution coming from the powers above has always constituted nothing more than the seizure of an old chair. When one wishes to push it aside, the chair appears loathsome, but the moment one grasps it, it suddenly feels like a treasure.’Footnote 34 In Li Jing’s play, this quote is written into a monologue spoken by the main character:
LU XUN I thought that revolution makes people free. But they tell me: It’s too early for freedom. I thought that revolution means being equal. But they tell me: let’s first get this chair, and then we will see what we will do … (laughs bitterly) Haha, so revolution actually means fighting for an old chair. When you want to topple it, then it seems extremely ugly; but once you hold it in your hand, then you discover that it’s so precious.Footnote 35
By interweaving all these different materials—texts or characters from Lu Xun’s works, images or thoughts from biographies or other sources written both in China or elsewhere, dramaturgical techniques drawn from the theatre of all times and places— Li Jing creates a new and unique ‘piece of cloth’, one that is interlinked with many theatrical, literary, and philosophical traditions but which, at the same time, cannot be easily reduced to any one of them.
Fragmenting characters
In a scene at the beginning of the play, the character Lu Xun suddenly finds himself in the company of the Young Man in Black Clothes and the Man with the Iron Skin.
Throughout the play, these three characters appear together several times. Although they always behave very differently, they somehow seem to belong together. For Li Jing, they are all parts of Lu Xun himself. As she points out:
The Man with Iron Skin is the super-ego of Lu Xun; he is a kind of moral authority that tries to impose restrictions. At the same time, he is also an official image, the impression that the Communist Party made on Lu Xun […] The Young Man in Black Clothes is Lu Xun’s id; he is the part of Lu Xun’s self most closely linked to his instincts; he is not encumbered by feelings of responsibility towards society or by ideology, or by feelings of moral responsibility.Footnote 37
Just as Freud used this terminology to describe the human psyche, in Li Jing’s play these different aspects of Lu Xun refer also to different parts of a possible biography. The Young Man in Black Clothes promotes the revolution and dies in it; the Man with the Iron Skin becomes a statue in his afterlife; the character Lu Xun—the Ego—finally tries to mediate between the super-ego and the id as well as between the other characters in the play. We may even say that the openness and fluidity of the Lu Xun character are increased due to his being interwoven with other characters in the play, such as the Young Man in Black Clothes.
For me, this technique of fragmenting and reassembling recalls the cosmopolitan ‘divided self’ as proposed by Yana Meerzon. It is ‘someone in the process of being re-fractured and redefined’.Footnote 38 Daxiansheng does not propose an ‘authentic self’ but rather many different parts or shades of one, arising through the ‘act of encounter’.Footnote 39 Every encounter sketches a different character and shows some of the most controversial moments of Lu Xun’s life, or his ‘darkest aspects’.Footnote 40 As the most eminent figure of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun is often discussed with reference to his modernity. However, Daxiansheng shows how he marries Zhu An in a traditional way. Before the ceremony starts, Lu Xun puts on a fake queue; during the ceremony, Zhu An loses one of the huge shoes that she has put on to hide her small feet, deformed by foot-binding. Both a fake queue and ‘small feet’ are symbols of the ‘old society’, usually something with which modern intellectuals such as Lu Xun are not associated. However, as Li Jing points out, these scenes were inspired by historical sources.Footnote 41 In addition, Lu Xun is shown as a character who has the ability to look at himself from outside and to create a distance from himself, so as to be able to comment on his own actions:
LU XUN Don’t you think that I am the most ridiculous person in this world? First, I run abroad and I shout: Away with the duties, I want to be free! Then, I run back home, behave like the most Confucian of sons and allow my mom to arrange my marriage. Abroad I shout: Away with the material, I want to have the spiritual! Let’s root for the individual, away with the masses! And back home, I put on a fake queue and behave according to customs and expectations. Don’t you think that I am the most ridiculous person in this whole world?Footnote 42
Lu Xun is certainly not the only character in the play who is constructed by techniques of fragmentation and transformation. According to the instructions imparted in the dramatis personae, a whole range of characters in the play are intended to be performed by the two heavenly messengers, Fat Man and Skinny Man, who appear at the beginning of the play with the mission to take Lu Xun to paradise. These two characters themselves display the traits and characteristics of the ‘comedy double-act’ so beloved in Chinese popular entertainment and indeed in such popular entertainment all around the world. They might have stepped directly out of a xiansheng cabaret performance—or a Laurel and Hardy movie. Li Jing recommends that they should transform into many other characters in the course of the play:
Thin Gentleman/Man in the Yellow Robe/Dignified Middle-Aged man/Ruler/Man with the Whip—all to be performed by Skinny Man
Fat Gentleman/Man with the Bone Hoop/Young Man who Never Smiles/Henchman/Inspector—all to be performed by Fat ManFootnote 43
These two characters, as well as all of their embodiments, can also be seen as part of a dramatic project that does not propose static, fixed, unified characters. In contrast, it experiments with fragmenting and rebuilding characters, in arranging new encounters, in translating them to new spaces.
Designing multiple atmospheres
When writing about contemporary cosmopolitan theatre, Meerzon mentions the latter’s similarities with the productions of earlier avant-garde theatre artists and these artists’ fondness for the wandering perspective of the ‘flâneur’.
Often, they opted for the artistic strategies of fragmentation, suspension of disbelief, syncopation, distorted point of view, and grotesque to reflect this condition of being a stranger. They also mixed autobiographical and memory narratives with surrealist imagery to depict the alienating power of the voyage as a separation of the gaze from the experience, of appearance from desire, of self from other, and of self from oneself.Footnote 44
Likewise, Daxiansheng does not display one unique style or mode from beginning to end. On the contrary, the play features all possible kinds of modes and atmospheres, from realism to romanticism, from tragedy to comedy, from slapstick to grotesque. Scenes in different modes rapidly succeed one another; it seems possible to arrange them differently, or even to exclude some of them entirely. As Li Jing pointed out in our conversation: ‘In fact, in the stage production of Daxiansheng you do indeed have all kinds of different effects and atmospheres. There is extreme comedy, and there are also very tragic scenes. All of this is combined on stage into one story. I actually really like this.’Footnote 45
The opening and the concluding scenes of the play are written in a realistic—indeed, even in a documentary-like—style. On the night of Lu Xun’s death. Doctor Sudo gives him an injection. Xu Guangping tells him to rest and goes downstairs. Li Jing revealed to me that she modelled these scenes on the part of Xu Guangping’s memoirs bearing on the night of Lu Xun’s death.
By contrast, the dialogues between Lu Xun and his mother, as well as those between Lu Xun and Zhu An, are set in a surreal atmosphere:
A scene between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping in the park—which, according to Li Jing, was inspired by some letters—remains the one brief romantic moment in the whole play. The scenes inspired by Lu Xun’s conflicted relationship with the League of Left-Wing Writers, and with the early communist movement as a whole, tend to work rather by means of parody and black humour.
The style and technique of the grotesque is used still more energetically in those scenes of the play that deal with violence.Footnote 48 In Daxiansheng Li Jing creates images such as The Man with the Bone Hoop, a character who constantly needs more bones from other characters in order to play with his hoop, and a scene depicting the Young Man in Black Clothes, who is shot by ten bullets while the executioner dances in front of him.Footnote 49 In this case, the use of this technique of the grotesque turns a scene that might otherwise have been taken to be specifically historically tied to the death of the left-wing writer Rou Shi—a figure very close to Lu Xun, who was executed by the Kuomintang government—into an image of violence and cruelty that seems to invite translation and transposition into any and every time or space. Through the use of abstraction, of the comical, of the surreal, and of the grotesque, Daxiansheng creates resonances with the respective time and space of the reader. By combining scenes of very different styles and modes, from documentary-like to tragic, from slapstick comedy to the absurd and the grotesque, the text refuses to be pinned down to any specific familiar genre.
Creating spaces of resonances
One of the characteristics of contemporary cosmopolitan theatre as described by Meerzon is its relationality. As she points out, ‘cosmopolitan theatre utilizes devices of relational dramaturgy to bring about an encounter between the spectator and the work of art, thereby confronting its audiences with resurfacing national, cultural, and ideological traditions’.Footnote 50 Daxiansheng is also a text that aims at involving, provoking, or even ‘offending’ the audience. ‘The audience needs to be offended’Footnote 51 is in fact the title of a collection of critical works written by Li Jing. The line itself derives from her review piece on Lin Zhaohua’s 2006 production of Ibsen’s Master builder.Footnote 52 The most discussed aspect of this production was that the actor Pu Cunxin, who played the role of the protagonist Solness, did not move at all for two whole hours, until the point at which he climbed the stairs leading to the top of the construction from which, in Ibsen’s play, he eventually falls to his death. Also, the style of speaking on stage was very different from that to which audiences at the Capital Theatre in Beijing were accustomed. In her review of the production, Li Jing speaks about ‘maofan guanzhong’ (‘offending the audience’) several times. ‘The acting method of this play without doubts offends the viewing habits of the audience.’Footnote 53 And, in the review’s final sentence: ‘In that moment, an audience which is used to stories and emotional expressions will, of course, be lost. However, it is only by offending the audience’s old habits that art can grow into everyone’s body.’ Footnote 54 I think that these lines, written in 2006, can be helpful for approaching and understanding Daxiansheng, which was written a few years later: more precisely, in the years between 2009 and 2012. By the technique of abstraction and re-contextualization, the text constantly translates characters from the past into a format that involves no relation to any concrete time or space. By departing from historical events and sketching them into grotesque scenes, which are further combined with other scenes, it works on resonances with contemporary situations and thus aims at prompting the participation of the audience, causing them to relate to the scenes on stage as they relate to their own times, lives, and contexts.
In the ‘Ah Q in paradise’ scene, for instance, Ah Q has no connection at all to the Xinhai Revolution or indeed to any other revolution. For me, he is like a person without any political or financial power in today’s world, who is continuously reminded by the powerful people around him to improve himself and urged by them to perform basically impossible pieces of acrobatics. At one point in a scene, which is thoroughly grotesque throughout, he is even asked to offer his son to the group as a meal—in exchange for a little improvement of his own situation. We might read this as suggesting that the cannibalistic society envisaged by the mad protagonist in Lu Xun’s story Diary of a madman really has been extended into the contemporary world:
The scenes featuring the intellectuals Lu Xun, his brother Zhou Zuoren, and the famous Hu Shi even involve an autobiographical moment, since both the author and the audience might be considered as intellectuals. The same applies here, in other words, as Chirita suggests applies in the case of the Comedy of Qin: ‘When exploring history, Li Jing turns this subjectivization process into one of self-scrutinization.’Footnote 56 For this reason, the dialogues historically inspired by the collaboration between Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, and Hu Shi in their younger years, and by their different relationships with politics later on in their lives, demand, in my opinion, to be translated into contemporary situations of intellectual positioning.
Zhou Zuoren is busy trying to catch a beautiful umbrella. Hu Shi gets locked inside a cage like a bird. Lu Xun tries to save others with a rope (‘unfortunately a rope’ as Zhou Zuoren comments). Read as a story about intellectuals, Daxiansheng narrates the dilemma of having beautiful ideals but not being able to realize more than just a very small part of them. ‘In the wrong times, at the wrong place, all of us separately did something right,’Footnote 58 says Hu Shi in a scene where the three of them seem to comment on their own activities by looking back at their own former selves. ‘Oh, this is why it looks wrong now,’ states Zhou Zuoren. ‘But do you think it gets right if we just wait?’ counters Lu Xun and continues his absurd struggle against a chair. In Daxiansheng, the answer to this problem is left, in the end, up to the audience.
Conclusions
Daxiansheng was staged both through a dramatic reading and on the stage of the National Theatre of China. As Li Jing revealed, young audiences in particular responded very well to the play:
I had the impression that young people were extremely excited. When people watched the Comedy of Qin, I noticed that people were very happy, some of them could not stop laughing, I think that the satire was extremely strong. In Daxiansheng the atmosphere was different, there was something sublime about this production, the atmosphere was sometimes nearly like in a church. There was excitement, there was also anger.Footnote 59
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, my hope is that a focus on dramaturgy can provide an alternative strategy for approaching contemporary Chinese theatre plays such as Li Jing’s Daxiansheng. Although a play like this makes use of elements, stories, and characters from local, traditional, and cultural knowledge—that is to say: although it can be read, as indeed can any work of art, in the political and social context of production—one would surely proceed too narrowly were one to try to reduce a discussion of its meaning to that environment alone. Topics like the ones that it addresses—namely, the responsibilities and tasks of intellectuals; the relationship between intellectuals and political or financial power; positions of displacement, multiple forms of belongings, the scrutinizing and the doubting of all kinds of traditions—are not limited to one specific environment.
By describing and discussing a number of dramaturgical aspects of Daxiansheng, such as the choices of material and perspective for the drama, the complex interweaving of all kinds of texts, the continuous fragmentation and reassembling of the characters, the open design of an indefinite number of scenes in different modes and atmospheres, as well as the continuous work on creating resonances throughout the play both with the contemporary situation of the author and with that of the work’s readers and its audiences, in this article I have aimed to explore the possibilities of reading Daxiansheng as a text that was indeed written in China—but by someone who cares deeply about the contemporary world as a whole.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
