Revealing “beauty” in modern Chinese theatre: Max Reinhardt as an anti-Ibsenite emperor in Yu Shangyuan’s translation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Traditionally, the Chinese indigenous theatre did not require a director. In 1924, Yu Shangyuan published two articles on the prominent modern theatre director Max Reinhardt, “Xianzai Niuyue de Laiyinhate” (Reinhardt in Today’s New York) and “Laiyinhate de “Qiji’” (Reinhardt’s The Miracle), offering Chinese readers a rare glimpse into the Western theatre directing system. Existing scholarship tends to regard the two articles as original works. The present paper argues that they were composed mainly of “unmarked translations” rendered from four foreign works. Anchored by this observation, this paper gives a detailed study of these two articles, covering the incentives for translation, the translation results, and the reasons behind the results. It unveils Yu Shangyuan’s orientation of theatre director as an artist-director instead of an administrator, presents his reconstruction of Max Reinhardt’s image as an “anti-Ibsenite emperor,” and discloses the relevance of his textual strategies to his artistic view. It demonstrates that Yu Shangyuan, influenced by the vision of “aesthetic drama,” purposely reshaped the image of Max Reinhardt so as to spread the gospel of a new conception of drama, that is, drama should purport mainly to afford the aesthetic experience, or reveal “beauty,” as Yu Shangyuan termed it.