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Is There a "Chinese" Brecht? Problems of Brecht's Reception in China - from Mother Courage to Mack the Knife WOLFRAM SCHLENKER TRANSLATED BY GERHARD HAUCK The first perfonnance of one of Brecht's plays in China took place in 1959, but only a small number of Chinese were willing to subject themselves to a production of Mother Courage and Her Children that was based on Brecht's model. Director Huang Zuolin later spoke ironically of "only a few stray cats making up the audience."r He attributed the lack of success to having "slavishly followed Brecht's handbook of direction'" and ostensibly having driven the audiences from the theatre by his use of the V-effect. 3 Huang was not, however, to be discouraged by this failure or by the subsequent suppression of Brecht's plays during the Cultural Revolution. Until the 1980s, he was one of the most important players in Brecht's reception in China, largely because, as onc of the most prominent directors in China, he was able to give support to the foreign author.4 THE RECEPTtON TRAP: THE "THEORY OF ALlENAT tON" Huang was first exposed to Brecht in England in 1936, when he was a student there. Above all, he was impressed by Brecht's essay on "The Alienation Effect in Chinese Acting." A glowing patriot (like many of his fellow citizens living abroad at the time), Huang was attracted to Brecht initially mostly because he was a well-known European theatre artist who had tackled traditional Chinese theatre in such a positive way. In other words, Huang approached Brecht from an angle that, to this day, is emphasized almost religiously in China in order to make Brecht acceptable. In the first essay on Brecht published in China, Huang wrote in 1959 that Brecht admired Mao, that he had a picLure of Mao hanging in his room, and that he had translated and commented on Mao's poetry; what's more, he claimed that Brecht had studied classical Chinese poetry, that he had himself composed poems with a Chinese background, and, above all else, of course, that he had learned a great Modern Drama, 42 (1999) 253 254 WOLFRAM SCHLENKER deal from Chinese theatre. Similarly, during a celebration commemorating Brecht's hundredth birthday in Beijing on II May 1998,5 Ihere was considerable lalk about Brecht's admiration for Mao, about his purported plan to "move from the GDR to China," about his study of Chinese philosophy and culture, and about a statement attributed to Helene Weigel that "the blood of Chinese art flows in Brecht's theatre.,,6 Such appropriations, however, are not mere oddities. The difficulties surrounding Brecht's reception, which I shaH outline below, made such appropriations more necessary than for authors who are considered more palatable - Stefan Zweig, for example, who had no trouble finding translators and whose works have been circulated in large numbers . During the celebratory speech of May t998, Zhang Li presented the argument that Brecht was able to devise his "entirely new and original alienation effect" only after he had immersed himself in the study of Chinese theatre arts.7 It is therefore still quite common in Chinese discussions to talk about Brecht's "theory of alienation."s This exposes a trap into which, foHowing Huang's lead, the entire reception of Brecht has faHen and from which it has not been able to extricate itself to this day. The V-effect is supposed to have been derived from traditional Chinese acting and it is therefore elevated incorrectly - to a central aspect of Brecht's theatre practice and theory. But no matter how pleased Huang and his patriotic foHowers are about the ostensible impact of traditional Chinese art on Brecht, Brecht's epic or dialectical theatre - and, above aH else, the seemingly central V-effect - continue to be a problem for them. When, on a theoretical level, it appeared to be an impediment that Chinese Brecht scholars stared at the purported "theory of alienation" as a rabbit stares at a snake (thus blocking their recognition of the wealth of Brecht's ideas and practical experiments in the theatre, no matter how contradictory ), the situation was much...

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