Adaptation as Appropriation: Staging Western Drama in the First Western-Style Theatres in Japan and China

Adaptation as Appropriation:

Staging Western Drama in the First Western-Style Theatres in Japan and China

Abstract

As the first forms of modern theatre in Japan and China, shinpa (new school drama) and wenmingxi (civilized drama) preferred adaptation to literal translation when staging Western plays, often converting them into local settings familiar to the audience. As a result, scholars have long disparaged the literary and theatrical values of these two forms and ignored their role in the emergence of Western-style theatre in Japan and China. This article examines the debate between foreignization and acculturation in translation studies, and situates the acculturation practices in shinpa and wenmingxi in the sociohistorical environment of Japan and China at the turn of the twentieth century. By tracing the paths through which several European plays, especially Othello and La Tosca, were adapted into shinpa and then wenmingxi, the essay argues that such theatrical domestication revealed an acute awareness of the countries' changing national identities as well as an attempt to appropriate Western-style theatre to reflect and affect these changes.

Acculturation/Domestication versus Foreignization

Writing about the debate between acculturation (also referred to as domestication) and foreignization in translation studies, Susan Bassnett cites French and German practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as examples of the opposed approaches, both "extensively justified in both intellectual and aesthetic terms":¹

The acculturation versus foreignisation debate has been with us for centuries. Grossly simplified, the issue hinges on whether a translator should seek to eradicate traces of otherness in a text so as to reshape that text for home consumption in accordance with the norms and expectations that prevail in the target system, or whether to opt for a strategy that adheres more closely to the norms of the source system. Acculturation, it can be argued, brings a text more completely into the target system, since that text is effectively aimed at readers with no knowledge of any other system. On the other hand, foreignisation ensures that a text is self-consciously other, so that readers can be in no doubt that what they are encountering derives from a completely different system, in short that it contains traces of a foreignness that mark it as distinct from anything produced from within the target culture.²

A century later in Japan and China, the same two opposed approaches were used to introduce and adapt Western theatre. There it first appeared in acculturated forms, only to be replaced later by styles that emphasized foreignization in translation and production.

The acculturated form of Western theatre, which emerged in Japan during the 1880s as a result of the country's modernization and Westernization, is known as shinpa (new school drama).³ It reached the height of its commercial success in the first decade of the twentieth century by combining acting styles of kabuki and Western realistic theatre, localizing European romantic and melodramatic plays and adapting Japanese melodramatic fictions. This model was emulated by the Chinese student group the Spring Willow Society (Chunliu She) in Tokyo, where in 1907 they staged an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, renamed Black Slave's Cry to Heaven (Heinu yutian lu). Subsequently, these students brought what they had learned back to Shanghai where this new theatre, known as wenmingxi (civilized drama),⁴ flourished throughout the 1910s.

However, as cultural and theatrical contact between Japan/China and the West widened and both countries continued down the path of modernization through Westernization, the pendulum gradually swung to favor foreignization in both translation and production. In Japan, this foreignizing format is known as shingeki (new drama),⁵ which theatre historians generally agree debuted in 1909 with a production of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman. It was directed by Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928), who was known for his unyieldingly canonical and foreignizing approach to translating and staging European plays.⁶ Starting from the 1920s, the same kind...