Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film (2019) is a timely, well-researched, and lucid book. It is a sequel to the author's other book Chinese Ibsenism: Reinventions of Women, Class and Nation (2019). Ibsen, Power and the Self deals with a significant change in the reception of Ibsen since China's opening up in the late 1970s. As the author Kwok-kan Tam says, “New stagings of Ibsen since the 1980s have featured Chinese theatre artists' experiments with different notions of the self, which is central to the tenets of Ibsenism. The Chinese stage must be completely reconceptualized so that Ibsen's female characters and their struggles can be presented within the frameworks of gender, class, state and ethical categories” (160). The major stage productions of Ibsen's works in China, such as Peer Gynt, The Lady from the Sea, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, and A Doll's House are discussed in detail in the context of China's postsocialist turn in the representation of power and the self.The key argument of Ibsen, Power and the Self is that Ibsen has played a crucial role in the individualization of the Chinese self, which has made possible the breaking down of the collectivist family structure in China in the early twentieth century. As Tam argues, “In the 1910s, Japanese- and Western-educated Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun and Hu Shi discovered Ibsenism, which they brought to China as an alternative to the collapsing Confucian morality based on family-society-state collectivism. Individualism, a core value in Ibsenism, gave the awakened Chinese a new concept of selfhood” (23). The social and class transformations in modern China caused numerous individuals homeless, and thus urging them to join a series of revolutions from the 1910s to the 1940s. The Socialist victory in 1949 to a large extent was attributable to the massive rise of homeless individuals inspired by Ibsen to leave home, and caused by Japanese invasion in the 1930s–1940s that collapsed the Chinese family system. Ba Jin's novel Family (Jia) and Mao Dun's Rainbow (Hong) are graphic representations of the disintegration of the Chinese family due mainly to Ibsen's influence via progressive journals, such as New Youth (Xin qingnian), and stage performances of Ibsen's plays. Ibsen has been revered by the intellectuals and the revolutionaries in China even up to today.The book has an “Introduction” entitled “Law, Ethics and Gender: Ibsenism in China's Quest for a Modern Selfhood,” which lays the theoretical and historical framework for contextualizing Chinese Ibsen productions as problematizations, as well as constructions, of the self. In Tam's analysis, central to the Chinese revolutions are sociocultural attempts in the twentieth century to reengineer the Chinese selfhood from the Confucian definition to the individualist and the collectivist redefinitions, and then in the twenty-first century a reversal back to the individualist selfhood with new conceptualizations in gender, body, and psychical complexities. There are eight chapters that follow the “Introduction,” dealing with different stage performances of Ibsen's plays as experimentations in theatre and film arts and in reframing the Chinese selfhood. In the Conclusion “Ibsen, Power and the Self in Postsocialist Chinese Stage Representations,” Tam provides further analyses pinpointing the power relations in which modern Chinese selfhood has undergone the different experimentations in socialist constructions and postsocialist deconstructions.In chapter 1 “Socialist Experimentations with A Doll's House,” Tam deals with Chinese attempts from the 1930s to the 1960s in building a socialist model of Ibsenism and femininity through staging A Doll's House in Shanghai, Beijing, and other cities. This chapter discusses ideological constructions of the new woman through stage visualizations, as well as how the Chinese model of Ibsenism came to shape. Little-studied and unnoticed materials on theatre history and rare photographs of the performances are used to unravel the secrets in scenic design and processes of actor training that led to socialist approaches in presenting Ibsen. Performances by the Shanghai Amateur Dramatists Association in 1935 and the China Youth Art Theatre in 1956 are studied in detail as illustrations of ideological underpinnings.In chapter 2 “Postsocialist Peer Gynt and Rethinking Chinese Selfhood,” Tam reviews the first Chinese stage performance of Peer Gynt in the context of China's quest for a new selfhood beyond socialism. The 1983 performance directed by noted director Xu Xiaozhong, then a professor and later president of the Central Academy of Drama, Beijing, was the first attempt in revisioning the Chinese selfhood by examining the Gyntian concepts of self in its relevance to the Chinese quest for modern identity. The play was performed as a repudiation of the socialist collectivist self, which was actually a negation of the self, resulting in people's lack of responsibility for their behavior, as the noted Chinese journalist Xiao Qian pointed out. Peer Gynt was performed with messages mocking the socialist self as loss of self. The question however, remained: what was the self and what sense of selfhood should the Chinese have at the collapse of socialism.In chapter 3 “National Allegory in Postsocialist A Doll's House,” Tam analyzes the 1998 A Doll's House directed by Wu Xiaojiang at the Central Experimental Theatre (now the National Theatre of China), Beijing, in which Nora is presented as a Norwegian woman who has married to a Chinese man and lived in China in the 1930s. As a result of conflict with Chinese culture, Nora, played by the Norwegian actress Agnete Haaland, complains about being repressed by her patriarchal husband who epitomizes Chinese values. Nora speaks English in the performance, whereas Helmer speaks Chinese. The bilingual performance is also a bicultural performance highlighting tension between Chinese and Western values, as well as between Chinese patriarchy and Western feminism. The imposition of Western values upon the Chinese is represented as a humiliation to China. The performance had a rerun in 2019, interestingly also allegorizing China as a nation-state with a rich cultural tradition in confronting Western values, though Nora was played this time by a Serbian actress.In chapter 4 “Gender and the Female Body in Cubist Representation,” Tam focuses on artistic and ideological innovations in the 2010 Beijing performance of A Doll's House as a dance drama, in which the Chinese transsexual ballerina Jin Xing played Nora. This performance was an international collaboration initiated by the Norwegian government-funded Ibsen International involving Norwegian and Chinese dancers. What is so special about this performance is that it presents Nora as a character whose multiple selves are represented by five other female shadow dancers dressed in different colors, such as red and white, to represent different inner moods and frustrations of a woman facing hardships and anxieties. The use of different groups of dancers in a Cubist synthesis to present Nora with psychical complexities is so far the most innovative and only successful experiment to probe gender issues on the Chinese stage.In chapter 5 “Power and Gaze in Chinese Experimentations with A Doll's House,” Tam argues that the different stagings of A Doll's House in China since the 1950s have been theatrical visualizations of power relations in the play, with each production being an exploration of ideological issues on femininity and power. In the productions by the China Youth Art Theatre in 1956 and the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1962, gaze had been used as a powerful means of ideological opposition between Helmer and Nora, and also as visualization in female resistance against male subjection. In the 2014 production in Beijing, however, less emphasis was placed on ideological oppositions between the male and the female, which in Tam's view is an attempt in moving away from the ideological approach in staging A Doll's House.In chapter 6 “Motherhood and New Womanhood in Ghosts,” a Hong Kong film adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts is discussed as a Sinicization of Christian values. Made by the Hong Kong director Tso Kea in 1960, Motherhood is the only Chinese film adaptation of an Ibsen play. The Chinese Mrs. Alving has turned herself from a housewife to a career woman managing the family business with the help of her elder brother who inculcates in her the ethics of new Confucianism. In the context of modern Chinese culture, the significance of the film lies in its depiction of a new womanhood inspired by Ibsen's Ghosts and in contrast to collectivist notions of female self constructed in mainland China. The chapter has many still photographs from the film to illustrate its cinematographic innovations, as well as its indebtedness to Edvard Munch's paintings of Ibsen's scenes.Chapter 7 “Women's Self in the Chinese Hedda Gabler and The Lady from the Sea” analyzes four stage productions of these two plays in the style of yueju and in modern spoken drama. Hedda Gabler was adapted into yueju opera in 2006 and staged in modern spoken drama in 2015; so was The Lady from the Sea in 2010 and in 2017. Hedda Gabler presents a capable and ambitious woman who is unfulfilled in marriage and in life and cannot realize herself. Furthermore, she is forced to commit suicide as she is responsible for the death of her former lover. The ambitions and frustrations of a woman are difficult to visualize on the stage, as they are mental states. However, the mental states of Hedda Gabler are presented in the yueju adaptation by the presence of shadows that serve as the inner self of the protagonist. The shadows are able to produce shocking dramatic effects because they look eerie and bloody on the stage. In The Lady from the Sea, the yueju adaptation also makes use of a shadow actress whose gestures and movements narrate the inner conflicts of the female protagonist. Such performances have deviated from traditional Chinese stage conventions and even further from the socialist de-emphasis on psychological portrayals. The Beijing 2017 spoken drama version of The Lady from the Sea has a very special scenic design that presents a large rectangular structure on stage, which serves as a window and also as a frame and in which Ellida stays and laments her being stranded on land. The rectangular structure serves the function of framing Ellida inside the medical discourse of Dr. Wangel, as well as inside the spell of the sea. It also visually separates the sea from the land on the stage. The scenic design deserves much credit for the success of the performance, which heightens Chinese understanding of Ellida's mental problems as being trapped in the male discourse.Chapter 8 “The Wild Duck and Its Tale in Two Cities” tells the story about how the Ibsen International could no longer present their works in China as a result of the tensions between Norway and China. For this reason, the Ibsen International had to collaborate with the City Contemporary Dance Company in Hong Kong to experiment with the play in a dance form and present it first in Hong Kong and later in Beijing as a participant in an international dance festival. The dance drama is titled Hedvig from The Wild Duck and it has a Norwegian choreographer Ina Christel Johannessen. In this chapter, analysis is focused on how dance movements can create meanings and visualize psychological states of the characters. The adaptation of the play into a dance drama is an ingenious attempt in using dance movements to suggest connections between the characters and the duck. The duck is a symbol of self-deception and it shows its happiness when it swims and dances in the attic pool. So are the characters in the play who have been deceived and have been living happily on a lie. Contrasted with the Hong Kong adaptation is a Beijing local production in spoken drama style in 2015, which was meant to remind the audience that behind their happy life is a big lie. The message is clear enough in the performance when it is placed against the China dream.In the Conclusion “Ibsen, Power and the Self in Postsocialist Chinese Stage Representations,” Tam highlights the changing conceptions of the self in socialist and postsocialist China, and sums up the Chinese attempts in representing and reconceptualizing Ibsen in new visions of gender, psyche, discourse, and stage art. Ibsen's metaphoric representation of the complex human self as an onion with multiple layers in Peery Gynt serves as a starting point in China's postsocialist reconceptualizations of selfhood in 1983, while the stage production of A Doll's House in Beijing sets the socialist model in 1956. Different stagings of A Doll's House since then and a film adaptation of Ghosts explore socialist and postsocialist reconceptualizations of gender and womanhood in China and Hong Kong. Hedda Gabler and The Lady from the Sea have been considered as enigma of the female self in both China and the West. Chinese experimentations in various stage forms of these two plays with different scenographic designs yield new insights into the complexities of femininity. The use of the ink dance form in Hedvig from The Wild Duck, not mentioned in any previous criticism, is an insightful point made by Tam in his analysis of the fluid images in the play and the transience of life as a life-lie. All in all, Tam's studies are performance analyses that have never been attempted before and can reveal the subtle relations between art form and ideology.This book is an important contribution to the study of the postsocialist reception of Ibsen in China. It examines the historical roles Ibsen has been playing in China's social and cultural revolutions and situates Ibsen in the postsocialist changes. The concept of the “postsocialist” used in the book means not only the historical dimension of China's opening up to the West since the 1980s, but also the paradigmatic shift beyond the socialist model. As Tam contends, “Since China's opening up in the 1980s, changes have occurred in almost all spheres of cultural production, with Chinse Marxist class ideology challenged by Western liberalism, and modern cultural practices by traditional aesthetic considerations. Various schools of thought and critical theories, such as neo-Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, deconstruction and feminism have gained grounds in China's cultural arena, making both cultural production and artistic practices contested and multifarious” (160). In such developments, theatre arts are given new space for experimenting with visual representations of the self, particularly in its intricate relations with a complex power structure in China. In particular, Ibsen performances are studied in the light of how the postsocialist self is (re)presented on the stage with signs of visual manipulation as sophisticated psychosocial formations involving gender, class, and nation.One special feature about the book is its visual analysis of stage representations of cultural and ideological changes in terms of innovations in scenography, acting style, actors' body movements, and gestures. By comparing the performance details in acting and scenographic design, Tam is able to trace the changes in various performances of the same play, for example, A Doll's House, Peer Gynt, Hedda Gabler, and The Lady from the Sea in different periods in China and thus establish a cultural genealogy of ideological and artistic changes that has informed several generations of Chinese theatre artists in staging Ibsen. Demonstrated by numerous illustrations of rare images and critical analysis, the book is the dedication of the author's lifelong efforts in scholarly research and archival work. The visual analyses are original and have never been attempted by other scholars. The book significantly contributes to the visual representations of Ibsen in a new age where psychoanalytic dimensions of the self, in particularly women's subjectivity, is fully displayed on the stage. Power relations in Ibsen's plays are no longer simply presented as ideological abstractions understood in the socialist age, but as resistance against the subjection of the self and against the negation of the subject. As Tam points out, “Western, particularly Norwegian, stage art in Ibsen productions has become a major source of inspiration and sponsorship for Chinese experimentations. New stage art opens up new visions of characterizations, and makes it possible to probe new possibilities of representations of the self in relation to power and the nation” (175). As analyzed in the book, the new representations of Ibsen in China, particularly in the last decade, have given theatre artists new space for experimentation.The author Kwok-kan Tam is an international authority in the study of Ibsen, especially in the reception of Ibsen in China. He has pioneered the subfield of the reception of Ibsen in China and has published extensively in this subfield since the 1980s. His doctoral dissertation, “Ibsen in China: Reception and Influence” (1984) is the world's first PhD thesis on the reception of Ibsen in China, which has inspired many later works done by other scholars in the field. His book Ibsen in China 1908–1997: A Critical Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (2001) offers by far the most complete bibliographic information about Ibsen's reception in China since the early twentieth century. He is the former Head and current member of the International Ibsen Committee, University of Oslo, which organizes scholarly activities to promote Ibsen studies worldwide.Overall, Ibsen, Power and the Self no doubt has left a remarkable imprint on the study of Ibsen. It is a highly informative, thoughtful, and valuable book for scholars and students, not only in the study of Ibsen, but also in fields of theatre, adaptation, performance, and Chinese literature, culture, and history. As Tam argues, “Ibsen has given the Chinese a voice to express themselves and a language of resistance against tradition. The language to confront authority, the voice to declare independence, and the courage to bang the door are vocalized and visualized on the stage to inspire young people who identify themselves with peer behaviour in the theatre public space” (36). This book is inspiring and will surely stimulate further discussion of Ibsenism in China in the present and future, when theatrical experimentation has advanced significantly in China over the past decade.