The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre

An inevitable problem of projects endeavoring to cover broad subjects is that they often promise more than they deliver. The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre is 253 pages in length. The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre is a mere six pages longer. But The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre is nearly the size of the other two together: 463 pages. The Cambridge Companion series offers yet a different range of vital statistics: the volume on Brecht is 302 pages, Arthur Miller 277, Eugene O’Neill 256, Medieval English Theatre 372, Ibsen 271, and Greek Tragedy 392. Perhaps these figures have more to do with audience demographics and sales prospects than scholarship, and perhaps I am being naive. But surely countries and continents are not commensurate.

Still, The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre is quite an achievement. The depth of coverage (praiseworthy, even in its brevity) is commendable, as is the range of subjects. The print is fine (which compensates somewhat for the size) and the volume is densely packed with information and photographs. The geographic range of the guide covers theatrical landscapes from Pakistan in the west to Japan in the east; the Korean peninsula in the north to the islands of Oceania in the south. The table of contents is organized alphabetically by country. Brandon justifies his organization saying:

In general we follow current national configurations, so that Tibet, for example, is included as a part of China, while Hong Kong and Taiwan are country entries. There are two exceptions: the separate nations of North and South Korea are covered in one entry, and the numerous islands of the South Pacific are grouped together in the Oceania article.

(vii)

Yet one wonders why Iran, the Arab countries, Israel, and Asian Turkey are excluded from the volume. It could be argued that the Middle East, although technically a part of Asia, is culturally isolated from the rest of the continent and does not rightfully have a place in this book. But then where does it belong? The other two omissions are Mongolia and Asian Russia; the reasons are mysterious.

Each country/chapter in the book includes a general introduction on theatrical traditions of the region followed by separate sections on major performance genres. All the chapters are visually augmented with gray text boxes containing biographic blurbs on major artists. Each chapter ends with bibliographic citations. This kind of organizational schema—invaluable to students and teachers—makes the volume physically attractive, easily navigable, and extremely accessible.

While narrative brevity and lexicographic organization give the impression of being wholesome—tracing the entire alphabet—it also elides gaps with decisive sweeps of generality. The fault with this guidebook then is not necessarily with its scholarship, but with the genre itself: the treatment the subject deserves and demands cannot be supplied by a dictionary-style guidebook. At the same time, brevity and summary are the conventions of the format, and there is still the need for such a publication. The problem seems irreducible. There is no denying the paucity of scholarship for the general Western reader on Asian theatre. There are enough excellent book-length studies of all the major Asian performance genres to fill many shelves, but none that provide sophisticated introductions to various forms. Moreover, as the sacrosanctity of Euro-American theatre breaks down, the demand for information on Asian theatre increases.

A major contribution of this book is the emphasis placed on contemporary performance as well as traditional Asian performance genres, countering the Orientalist interest that Western theatre scholars have shown towards traditional Asian performance.

As a South Asian specialist I must note that the chapters on Pakistan and Bangladesh stop short, ending with the 1960s, and are more about what occurred before the two nations came into existence than what is happening now. The section on the theatre of Bangladesh since Independence is no more than an 11-line paragraph in a one-page chapter. Ditto with Pakistan. In the chapter on India, the longest in the book (53 pages), among many oversights (ascribable largely to severe spatial constraints), are the inexcusable omissions of Girish Chandra Ghosh (the 19th-century playwright-director-actor), Toppil Bhasi (the playwright from Kerala), Bhartendu Harishchandra (the Hindi dramatist), Sombhu Mitra (the director-actor from Bengal), and Vijay Tendulkar (the Marathi playwright). The bibliography at the end of this chapter is also incomplete. Specialists on other regions might find similar problems with relevant chapters. Even while functioning within the ubiquitous commercial logic of publishing, this guide succeeds, though somewhat inadequately, in filling a void in Asian theatre scholarship in the West by bringing diverse information together under a single title. “Inescapably,” the editor points out at the end of his introduction, “the performers of Asia and Oceania are becoming responsible not just to their local audiences but also to audiences around the world” (11). Whether Western scholars of Asian theatre, and more importantly publishers, can be just as responsible remains to be seen.