The Night a Tiger Was Captured (Huohu zhi yiye)

Abstract

In 1968 a giant of the Chinese spoken drama movement died unnoticed in prison, having fallen victim to the vicious purges instigated by Jiang Qing and her cohorts during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Eleven years would pass before Tian Han's name was formally restored to honor and his lifelong contributions to theatre publicly acknowledged by the Chinese government and his surviving colleagues. Teacher, director, actor, playwright, translator, administrator, and political bureaucrat, Tian Han spent over half a century at the helm of the modern Chinese theatre movement before his public disgrace and imprisonment in 1966.1 Born in 1898 in Changsha, Hunan province, his enthusiasm for theatre started early in his teenage years when he began writing and performing in his own plays. His fledgling effort, A Mother Teaches Her Son, about a widow who urges her son to appreciate the legacy of a father who had given his life for the 1911 Revolution, was published in the Changsha Daily News (Chen 1961, 8). After Tian graduated from Changsha Normal School, financial support from his uncle Yi Meiyuan made it possible for him to further his education in Japan. Yi had hoped for a career in government for his nephew, but Tian's seven-year sojourn from 1914 to 1921 was to produce a poet, not a politician. In Japan Tian discovered the playwrights who would change his life and philosophy of theatre: Ibsen, Chekhov, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Lady Gregory, Synge, Goethe, Wilde, Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Hebbel. Writing to his friend Guo Moro in 1920, Tian proclaimed a pas-