The Role of the Chou (“Clown”) in Traditional Chinese Drama: Comedy, Criticism and Cosmology on the Chinese Stage by Ashley Thorpe (review)

CHINOPERL Papers No. 28 (2008-2009)©2009 by the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature Book Review: The Role of the Chou (“Clown”) in Traditional Chinese Drama: Comedy, Criticism and Cosmology on the Chinese Stage, by Ashley Thorpe. Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. 351 pp. Ashley Thorpe’s The Role of the Chou (“Clown”) in Traditional Chinese Drama: Comedy, Criticism and Cosmology on the Chinese Stage is the first and sole monograph dedicated to the subject of the chou 丑 role in Chinese opera. It is comprehensive and insightful. The book consists of 351 pages and includes six chapters, foreword, introduction, and conclusion, twenty-seven illustrations (photographs, drawings, scores, graphs and tables), three appendices, glossary, bibliography, and index. The work is, overall, well grounded in solid research with ample use of primary and secondary sources, fieldwork and interviews, and enriched by theories drawn from religion, anthropology, psychology, and theatre studies. However, this reviewer finds one of the author’s theories less than convincing. The first three chapters of The Role of the Chou (“Clown”) in Traditional Chinese Drama follow a familiar trajectory. Chapter 1 provides a historical context for the chou role by examining the evolution of court jesters since antiquity and early comic roles (particularly the jing 净 role) from the Tang to the Yuan dynasties. Chapter 2 traces the rise of the chou from its origin as a comic side-kick of the jing before it attained the status of a central role in its own right by the Ming dynasty. The author analyses the chou role in specific plays such as Zhang Xie zhuangyuan 張 協狀元 (Top Graduate Zhang Xie), Pipaji 琵琶記 (The Lute), Huanshaji 浣紗記 (Washing Silk) and Naihetian 奈何天 (What Can You Do About Heaven?), and concludes that the chou both reinforces and contests Confucian values. Chapter 3 describes performance practice and methods of acting for the two main chou categories in Jingju 京劇 (Peking opera or Beijing opera): the civil wenchou 文丑 and the military/acrobatic wuchou 武丑, and their sub-categories. It includes eight templates for painting different subcategories of chou faces and uses excerpts from various plays to explain the characteristics of an assortment of chou roles. Chapter 4 is a transitional discourse about the history of the use of drums in shamanism, from oracle bone divination, to the still existing ritual yubu 禹步 (Yu Step). It also examines the use of gongs and cymbals CHINOPERL Papers No. 28 in exorcizing evil influences in rituals. This connection between percussion instruments used in Chinese theatre to shamanistic rituals is insightful, and consistent with the by now widely accepted idea that traditional Chinese drama played an important role in religious rituals. This discussion leads to the author’s thesis about the chou as an exorcist and an inversionary comic with cosmic unifying functions. Although the author’s discussion implies that all dramatic roles fulfilled ritual functions originally, he does not demonstrate convincingly that the chou was necessarily more efficacious than the other roles. Indeed, Chapters 4 through 6 contribute more to the study of exorcism in Chinese theatre and the role of comedy in ritual contexts in general, than to the functions of the chou per se. In Chapters 5 and 6, Thorpe further develops the idea that the chou is an exorcist and sacred clown, who plays a significant part in the ordering of the spirit world and bringing harmony to the universe. The chou is no longer the didactic entertainer presented in the first three chapters. In Chapter 5, he is endowed with the power of exorcism and given cosmological attributes through being constructed as a paradoxical and contradictory sacred clown-type, who creates order by virtue of being a force of disorder. Thorpe goes into great length to argue this theoretical framework, but the examples he presents are, unfortunately, rather unconvincing. For example, Thorpe says that in the play Wuhuadong 五花 洞 (Five Flower Cave), performed originally during Duanwu jie 端午節 (The Dragon Boat Festival) in which the anthropomorphic wudu 五毒 (five poisons or pestilences) are subdued by Judge Bao, the chou who plays Wu Dalang 武大郎, victimized by the wudu (also played by chou), serves an exorcistic function through a “system of symbolic transference and scapegoating…..” (p. 223). While I agree...