As Eugenio Barba observed, ‘the history of Mei Lanfang is a subterranean, invisible history which radiates in all directions’, touching nearly every aspect of modern theatre (quoted on p. 107). It is an oversight on the part of Western theatre scholars that the Chinese perspective on twentieth-century performance theory has remained invisible and silent. Min Tian has finally filled this gap with his thoroughly researched and engaging book. In part one, his tracking of Mei Lanfang's journey through the imaginations of Europe and the United States exposes the network of misappropriations, misunderstandings, and ‘displacements’ that fostered contemporary Western theatre. In part two, he reverses the perspective to China, demonstrating how the rise of Western-style theatre (huaju) in turn undermined and ultimately reinvented China's relationship with its indigenous theatrical forms, especially Chinese opera (xiqu).

The investigation of Mei Lanfang's impact on the West is by far the most fascinating and well-developed portion of the book. However familiar the story of Brecht's first historic glimpse of Mei in performance may be to theatre historians, rarely has the cultural misunderstanding that led to the formulation of his own theories been explicated so articulately. Min provides clear, detailed insights into the aesthetic apparatus of xiqu through the writings of its most influential practitioners, such as Tang Xianzu, Huang Fanchuo and Mei Lanfang himself. He examines the works of Western theorists point by point in comparison to the Chinese traditions that inspired them, constructing a history of performance theory that adds a third dimension to the prevalent occidental perspective. Part two lacks the biographical thrust of part one, which featured Mei as its protagonist, yet Min's observations on the tumultuous development of huaju and its attendant forms tell a story of betrayal followed by reconciliation: the betrayal being in Western theatre's destructive effects on xiqu in Maoist China, when the dogma of socialist realism threatened traditional Chinese performance types with extinction. Min then relates xiqu's gradual rehabilitation and eventual rediscovery in contemporary Chinese theatre, where artists such as Huang Zuolin, Gao Xingjian, Xu Xiaozhong and Lin Zhaohua continue to develop new forms out of its endlessly fertile material.

This study is long overdue, and ought to be required reading for any advanced student of drama for its illuminating examination of the ‘other side’ of modern Western theatre. Without overstating his case, or falling back on overused postcolonial rubrics, Min reveals how genuinely fruitful and rewarding encounters of difference and displacement can be, and how theatre the world over continues to be shaped by these encounters.