The Reception of the Theatre of the Absurd in China

Abstract

Although the Theatre of the Absurd was known in China relatively early, about ten years after its emergence in France, the real reception of this new form of Western theatre happened only after 1978. This paper tries to trace the history of its reception in China from the very beginning till the first decade of the 21st century. It emphasizes the translation, publication,  research, and mise-en-scene of S. Beckett, E. Ionesco, and J. Genet, as well as that of Pinter and Albee, etc., which are related to the political situation and the cultural policies adopted by the Chinese Communist Party and government. 

The paper is divided into two parties: the first focuses on the text dissemination and research of the abovementioned absurdist playwrights from the early 1960s to the first decade of the 21st Century. The Theatre of the Absurd was first introduced when China was dominated by anti-Western ideologies; only two plays were translated and published internally and served as objects of criticism. But fifteen years later, thanks to the new authorities’ Open up and Reform policy during the New Era, a wave of translation and introduction of this so-called “new school of French theatre” arose. The second part of the paper is about the stage performances of the Theatre of the Absurd. Compared to the text translation, they appeared much later, in the middle of the 1980s, when the first Chinese performance of Beckett’s most famous play was staged at Shanghai Theatre Academy.

Through this brief survey of the introduction and the development of the Theatre of the Absurd in China, one can find that the fate of this theatre depends on the political and ideological situation in China, especially at the very beginning. Both the research and the stage performance of the absurdist plays reached a climax near the end of the 20th century when China became more and more open and established the “socialist market economy.”