Modern Drama from Communist China ed. by Walter J. Meserve and Ruth I. Meserve (review)

BOOK REVIEWS MODERN DRAMA FROM COMMUNIST CHINA, edited by Walter]. Meserve and Ruth 1. Meserve. New York: New York University Press and London: University of London Press, 1970. 368 pp. $10.00 cloth, $3.95 paper. Compared with modern scholarship in other forms of art and literature, that of the Communist Chinese drama and theatre is relatively limited. So far there has been no book in English dealing with this subject in depth. Only a limited number of Communist plays are available in English translation, published mostly in Peking by either the Foreign Languages Press or the monthly journal Chinese Literature. Researchers in Communist Chinese drama used to be able to purchase FLP playscripts from Hong Kong and through a few book dealers in the United States; but since the Cultural Revolution most of the pre-1966 theatre books, playscripts, and related materials have been retrieved from the market. Against such background, the publication of Meserve and Meserve's anthology Modern Drama from Communist China is indeed a welcome contribution to this relatively barren field of study. In this pioneering anthology, the editors have selected a total of nine plays: Snow in Midsummer by Kuan Han-ching, the Passer-by by Lu Hsun, Dragon Beard Ditch by Lao Sheh, The White-haired Girl by Ting Yi and Ho Ching-chih, The Women's Representative by Sun Yu, Yesterday by Chang Pao-hua and Chung Yi-ping, Magic Aster by Jen Teh-yao, Letters from the South by Sha Seh et al., and The Red Lantern by Wong Ou-hung and Ah Chiao This collection includes a variety of Chinese theatrical forms: Yuan drama (Snow), spoken drama (Dragon, Women, Letters), revolutionary Peking opera (Red Lantern), children's play (Magic Aster), opera (White-haired Gir!), vaudeville comic dialogue (Yesterday). and dramatic prose-poem (Passer-by). One is immediately struck by the fact that some of the selections do not fit with the book title. The very first selection, Snow in Midsummer, was written by the most celebrated Yuan dramatist Kuan Han-ch'ing in the thirteenth century_ The translation followed the original quite faithfully, not a "revised version following the Party line." The Passer-by by Lu Hsun has never been taken seriously as a "play" by Chinese scholars, and the reader will find little evidence of "blatant propaganda" in this short piece (only five pages) to consider it "Communistic drama." The sixth entry Yesterday is actually a script for hsiang-sheng-a popular form of entertainment in Peking area very much like the comic dialogue between two comedians in vaudeville and variety shows. Had the editors substituted these three with some typical Communistic plays like The Test (by Hsia Yen), The Long March (by Ch'en Ch'i-t'ung), On Guard under the Neon Lights (by Shen Hsi-meng et al.), a better sample of "propaganda plays" would have been drawn. One also gets an impression that this anthology may have been put together in a hurry. All translations are reprinted directly from the FLP playscripts and from Chinese Literature, with all their accompanying notes but without some of the original introductions. There is no bibliography (something helpful for beginning students), no stage pictures of the selected plays (something interesting to theatre scholars, and quite a lot of them are available in Communist publications) except an unidentified one on the cover jacket. The editors have provided a fifteen-page Introduction, but it is perhaps too short to cover the "development 104 1972 BOOK REVIEWS 105 .or the change in dramatic literature, theatre, and politics in Communist China from 1919 to the current 'cultural revolution'" (Preface). The etditors would have fulfilled their intentions better had they devoted the entire fifteen pages to the history, development, theories, critical analysis of dramatic literature, etc., putting the rest of the material (background of the play, the author, production history. Communist reaction to the production, etc.) in the form of short introductions preceding each play. A few factual mistakes were found in the Introduction. For instances. the Chinese title for Snow in Midsummer is Tou Ngo Yuan, not Tou Ngo (p. 4); Chou Hsin-£ang was not a dramatist (p. 5) but a noted Peking...