Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced by Min Tian (review)

CHINOPERL Papers No. 31 228 (p. 13). She makes her case in a way that will be attractive to both the generalist and the specialist. The generalist will be grateful for the meticulous and elegant translations, and the specialist will appreciate the careful documentation (almost sixty pages of notes) and the four valuable appendices (covering, respectively, non-standard orthography in the scripts, shadow playscript collections [including Chen’s own], the main plays of various local traditions, and shadow plays featuring women warriors). As noted above, the survival of Chinese shadow theater is threatened by the decline of traditional popular religion and the rise of television and other forms of electronic entertainment. Chen relates that over 85% of the troupes that one researcher visited in the early 1980s no longer existed by the 1990s (p. 3). Chinese shadow theater has not received the attention that it deserves. The work that Chen has already published is very timely, and we can all hope that we will see more from her and that her example will inspire others to work on shadow theater. We can also hope that references to shadow theater in mass media such as To Live and the 2011 pop song, “Shadow Play” (“Piying xi” 皮影戲) by Jay Chou (Zhou Jielun 周杰倫), will help stimulate increased interest in this once very common and influential tradition. Jennifer W. Jay University of Alberta Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced. By Min Tian. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xi + 298 pp. 12 illus.. Cloth $95.00. Any cultural exchange involves understanding as well as displacement. What matters is: what kind? A special case of human activity is an actor performing to an audience. In the history of European acting and theories on acting, one trend has focused more on the actor’s emotional activity (the so-called “warm” actor) and an opposite trend more on his or her mental activity (the so-called “cold” actor). This distinction is, of course, a simplification, for human beings feel and think: you cannot have one without the other, even though you may alternate between focusing on the BOOK REVIEWS 229 two. Nonetheless, that is precisely what the German playwright-director Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) famously ignored, when he watched the guest appearance in Moscow in 1935 of the Chinese xiqu 戲曲 (Chinese indigenous theater) performer of female roles Mei Lanfang 梅蘭芳 (1894– 1961) and claimed in his subsequent 1936 essay “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” (Alienation effects in Chinese acting) that the acting of Mei and in xiqu generally was an admirable example of “cold” acting. In his 1997 article “‘Alienation-Effect’ for Whom?”18 the Chinese-American Min Tian had a most appropriate showdown with Brecht’s misinterpretation. From this core, over the years an impressive output of publications concerning this intercultural case has flowed from Tian’s pen. His adding a Chinese perspective (he earned one Ph.D. in China before coming to the U.S. to earn another) to the whole question is in itself of great value. Tian, of course, is not the only Chinese to have taken Brecht on—the pioneer is the Chinese stage director Huang Zuolin 黄作霖 (1906–1994) in his article “Mei Lanfang, Stanislavsky, Brecht: A Study in Contrasts”19 —but Tian has written the most over the longest period of time. As it should, his point of view has been in constant reaction to other points of view as they have been made known in the international discussion of the art of Mei Lanfang in particular and of xiqu in general, but the core of his argument has not changed. To his 1997 article on Brecht, Tian in 1999 added an equally critical one on the Russian stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s (1874–1940) interpretation of xiqu as presented by Mei Lanfang during his 1935 visit to the Soviet Union.20 Tian has reused those two critical articles as central parts of his three subsequent books. In the first of these, The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre,21 he simply reprints them among his chapters documenting his discussion of Western misinterpretations of Chinese 18 Min Tian, “‘Alienation-Effect’ for...