Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film

Abstract

I highly recommend Kwok-kan Tam’s excellent monograph, titled Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film, as an essential text book for undergraduate classes and graduate seminars in comparative drama, world theatre, Chinese performance culture, and for general readers looking for fascinating stories about how the introduction of Ibsen into China has fundamentally changed the political, ideological and cultural landscapes of its art scenes. This book is an important read for anyone studying art and theatre with or without a non-Western focus. Having published numerous books and articles on Ibsen and modern Chinese drama and cinema, Tam is one of the best scholars to complete this study, which yields a new understanding of the complex relationships between Western traditions and Chinese theatre. Even though its subtitle marks “postsocialist” period as its main focus, Ibsen, Power and the Self exceeds its expectation: this book traced a century of Ibsen’s influence on the formation of modern Chinese culture. Throughout the book, discussions were contextualized around key intellectual figures’ early explorations of modern drama in connection with its ideological function: from Chen Duxiu, who promoted theater to educate the Chinese mind, to Hu Shi, who translated Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and published his famous manifesto on “Chinese Ibsenism” to advocate individualism and woman’s equality, and to Lu Xun, who questioned, in 1923, what would happen to Nora after she had left home without economic opportunities. All three figures represented more than two polarities of Chinese intellectual trends at the time: Chen as the radical socialist who