Contemporary Chinese Theatre: The Curtain Rises

Abstract

Opening night of a new play at the Adelaide Festival. The well-dressed audience mingles in the bars at interval, more preoccupied with pre-show parking problems and where to go for supper than with the issues of the play. The playwright himself seems to have compromised his passion by attempting to accommodate these people; live theatre for most Australians is an ornament, a diversion. The festival trappings emphasise the essentially financial relationship between artists and audiences: Australians buy theatre as another disposable commodity; as with chewing gum, they extract the flavour and spit out the substance. Creativity is defined as the process of discovering new flavours attractive to the market, not of defining the nation's eating habits and providing basic nourishment. I suppose my own preoccupation with the Chinese theatre comes from the sense that something different is happening there, that somehow the relationship between theatre and society is more basic there than it is here. In China the substance of theatre is digested by the people like rice, fundamental to life. The flavour or form is analysed, but primarily to make the substance palatable. Creativity is defined as the process of garnishing the form so that the substance can be swallowed, with personal necessity subsumed to the common good. The difference is seen most clearly in the contemporary Chinese drama (hua ju). It is seen in the caricatures of opposing attitudesthe Chinese view of contemporary Western theatre as bourgeois, decadent and trivial (and therefore, in the current climate, gaudily attractive to some); the foreigner's view of Chinese drama as mere propaganda for the socialist state. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution period in 1976 there has been an enormous transformation in the performing arts, with a revival of the traditional repertoire, the rebuilding of old companies (and the creation of new ones), the rediscovery of foreign literature and music, and a general