Liyuanxi – Chinese ‘Pear Garden Theatre’

Abstract

This book offers an engaging introduction to the Hokkien music drama known as liyuanxi ('Pear Garden Theatre'), heir and current expression of one of China’s oldest unbroken xiqu ('Chinese opera') traditions. In examining the form, Josh Stenberg considers its history prior to the 20th century, reforms during the Communist era, and accounts for its prominence today. He examines the aesthetics and technique that characterize the form, considers the contribution of some of its key exponents and lastly provides a range of case studies of various plays performed in the repertoire. Stenberg illustrates how liyuanxi is musically and narratively highly distinctive and explains its close association with the historic port city of Quanzhou. After first reaching nationwide renown in the new state-led theatre system of the 1950s, liyuanxi was, like all tradition-based Mainland Chinese genres, decimated in the Cultural Revolution. This study argues that since the Deng Xiaoping era the genre has again achieved prominence with its daring, socially-engaged, literary, and often comical new ‘historical’ costume pieces, while also maintaining a major artistic and pedagogical commitment to its tradition. As well as popular liyuanxi plays, Stenberg discusses the work of the only liyuanxi theatre troupe currently working, the Fujian Province Liyuanxi Experimental Theatre (FPLET), as well as that of renowned practitioners Zeng Jingping, the genre’s most famous performer and director of the FPLET since 1989, and Wang Renjie, a playwright whose work, Stenberg argues, respects prosodic tradition and musical requirements while crafting plays that engage with the issues of contemporary China.