T'ien Han and the Romantic Ibsen

T'IEN HAN AND THE ROMANTIC IBSEN AMONG ALL LIVING PLAYWRIGHTS OF China T'ien Han has had the longest dramatic career. Born in 1898, his life is inseparably interwoven with the growth of modern Chinese drama, a genre born out of the influence of Western drama. He has been very active in almost every aspect of this drama for more than four decades. He was the founder of the well-known South Land Drama Society (Nan-kuo she), South Land Fine Arts College (Nan-kuo i-shu hsueh-yiian), editor of the South Land Bi-weekly (Nan-kuo panyueh -k'an), and has surpassed all other modern Chinese playwrights in sheer volume of output. He is one of the most important playwrights of modern China, and each stage of his dramatic creativity reflects a period in the development of modern Chinese drama. In the 1920'S T'ien Han was a romantic playwright; in the 30's and 40's he became a patriotic and realist dramatist, and since 1949 he has been and is still high in the official literary hierarchy of the Peking regime.1 In the early days of modern Chinese drama, he was 'perhaps the most popular and influential playwright and was considered in the drama circle as the "big brother." The uniqueness of T'ien Han as a playwright is most characteristically shown in the plays he wrote in the 1920'S. Not only did he produce some of his best plays in these years, but his plays also showed, more than other playwrights', a subtle influence of Western drama. T'ien Han's interest in Western drama developed while he was a student in Japan. He had seen quite a few European plays performed by Japanese companies, and had read many of them in English translation.2 He was especially interested in modern drama; Strindberg, Georg Kaiser, Sudermann, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Yeats, Synge and Hofmannsthal were no strangers to him.s He had even greater interest in expressionist drama and was overwhelmingly impressed by Georg Kaiser's Der Burger von Calais, performed by the Japanese, and the expressionist motion picture The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. He felt that he had experienced a "sharp and fan1 He is the chairman of All China National Association of Drama Workers (Chung-hua ch'iian-kuo hsi-chii kung-tzo-che hsieh-hui) and director of Drama (Hsi-chu pao), but he is now having trouble with the Communist party lines. 2 When he was studying in Japan, T'ien Han frequently used English ex. pressions in discussing literary problems. He had also shown strong interest in going to. study drama in New York or London instead of staying in Japan. S Letter to Kuo Mo-jo, T'ien Han San-wen Chi (Collected Prose Writings of T'ien Han), Shanghai, 1936. 389 390 MODERN DRAMA February tastic feeling of beauty and excitement and shiver in my soul" by seeing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.4 T'ien Han's greatest respect, however, has been reserved for Ibsen. While in Japan, he used to call himself the "Budding Ibsen of China."5 His most recent show of respect for Ibsen was an article in the Kuang-ming Daily, Peking, July 27, 1956, "To Learn Again From the Great Realist Dramatists: In Memory of Bernard Shaw and Ibsen" ("Hsiang hsien-shih-chu-i hsi-chii ta-shih-men tsai hsiieh-hsi: Chi-nien Hsiao-po-na ho I-pu-sheng"). Ibsen was not an unfamiliar figure in China in the 1920'S, and his influence there reached far beyond the circles of drama and literature . His plays and ideas drew great enthusiasm, particularly during the years around the May Fourth Movement of 1919. A special issue on Ibsen was published by the influential magazine New Youth (Hsin ch'ing-nien) in June, 1918. He was considered by Ch'en Tu-hsiu (1879-1942), a professor at the National Peking University, editor of New Youth and later one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, as one of the three greatest men of letters of the world (the other two were Tolstoy and Zola). Dr. Hu Shih (d. 1962...