For Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao Zedong’s wife, the ‘script’ of the yangbanxi or revolutionary model operas produced during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) was ‘key’. As Tarryn Li-Min Chun reminds us in the fourth chapter of her study, Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China, Jiang Qing had an important role in shaping the yangbanxi theatricals, personally revising several of the pieces herself and formulating the artistic principles directing stage practice (p. 146). For Chun, however, the script in twentieth-century Chinese drama and opera after the end of the Qing empire in 1912 is anything but the key, which instead lies in a complex interplay of (real and faked) technology, staging technique and ideology. Each of Revolutionary Stagecraft’s five main chapters deals with the theatrical practice of a relatively self-contained period of modern Chinese history – early republican, the golden age of huaju (or non-musical stage play), the early years of the People’s Republic of China, the Cultural Revolution and the Reform Era – and each focuses on one or two main theatrical productions, while generalizing about their generic analogues and establishing the scientific and technological, as well as political and ideological, contexts in which the productions found themselves imbricated. Chun’s overall account of Chinese theatre from the 1920s to the 1980s is chronological and, like the stage technology it documents, evolving – though not always synchronically or teleologically, and there is ample evidence throughout this evolution that, when theatre artists were confronted with non-existent or inaccessible technology, the frequent resort to improvisation and ‘low-tech tu (i.e. home-grown) ingenuity’ (p. 170) made for some of the theatre’s most creative effects.

In her discussion of ‘typical’ characterization during the Cultural Revolution, Chun asks us to think about the distinction between ‘representative’ and ‘exemplary’. Her choice of typical productions from each of the five periods, as it happens, is both: Sergei Tetr′iakov’s Roar, China!, performed by the Shanghai Theatre Society in 1933; Foggy Chongqing (1940) by Song Zhidi; Xia Yan’s Under Shanghai Eves (1937); Thunderstorm (1936) and Sunrise (1936) by Cao Yu; Tian Han’s Fantasia of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (1958); Shen Ximeng, Mo Yan and Lu Xingchen’s Sentinels under the Neon Lights (1963) and The East is Red (1964); The Red Lantern (1970) and Morning/On the Docks (1963); the translation/adaptation of Brecht’s Life of Galileo by Chen Yong in 1979; and Li Weixin, Zheng Bangyu, Li Yonggui and Zhou Liguo’s Atoms and Love (1980).

Chun does not attempt a comprehensive literary interpretation of any one of these many and various theatrical productions. Indeed, only very occasionally does she refer to them as ‘dramatic literature’ (p. 31), but the text or script is never the focus of critical attention. Time and again we are told that ‘effects and properties were woven into the fabric of the play in a way that made them essential to plot and character development’ (p. 152), but we are given little, if any, indication of what that plot and character development might be or of how, exactly, plot and character were affected. To use the subtitle of her Introduction, Chun is ‘Thinking Chinese Theater through Technicity’, not through literature – a point I make by way of clarification rather than complaint. In Chapter 2, for example, we are assured that, in Foggy Chongqing, Song Zhidi’s stage description ‘envisions the space as a liminal one that mirrors the conflicted psyche of the play’s characters both in its structure and its meteorological characteristics’, but without detailed reference to the script we learn nothing of those characters beyond their ‘state of mental and spiritual uncertainty’ (pp. 63–4). It is stage technology and stage effects, not dialogue, that ‘animates the emotional core of the theater’ (p. 80) for Chun, and the only occasion on which she engages with the more traditional aspects of plot and characterization, speech and action, is in her discussion of Brecht’s Life of Galileo (pp. 182–5) by Chen Yong.

Chun’s investigation into the technologies of Chinese theatre from the 1920s to the 1980s, on the other hand, negotiating ‘among technological potential, historical exigency, and human agency’ (p. 24) and including all ‘the objects and apparatus of the theater’ (p. 7) and all its supporting texts and paratexts, is informed, intelligent and thorough, and the claims she makes for them are persuasive.