Teahouse or Not? Meng Jinghui’s Avant-garde Version of Lao She’s Classic Play

Abstract

Lao She’s Teahouse is considered a masterpiece of Chinese theatre, a classic crystallized in the Beijing People’s Art Theatre’s production by Jiao Juyin from 1958, which has been regularly staged up to the present day. In 2018 a production by the well-known “pop avant-garde” director Meng Jinghui premiered at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, giving rise to a heated debate about the concept of “classics.” This so-called “Teahouse incident” was one of the hot topics of the Chinese theatre scene in 2019, and this article explores the production’s polarized reception and debate. Meng Jinghui’s Teahouse is not examined as a one-way influence between Lao She’s source text and the new text/performance but from the perspective of a network relationship that sets the performance in a web that includes several other texts (plays, novellas, poems, etc.) by Chinese and foreign writers. This perspective shows how Meng Jinghui’s hybridization and his selection of intertexts and stage reminders aim to erase time and space coordinates in order to amplify the main themes of the play and, ultimately, reflect on the human condition. Based on this analysis, the polarized reception of the play and the reactions of the general public, critics, and academics are investigated, illuminating the reasons behind the controversy.