Will Godot Come by Bus or through a Trace?: Discussion of a Chinese Absurdist Play

Will Godot Come by Bus or through a Trace? Discussion of a Chinese Absurdist Play! H ARRY H. KUOSHU The BUS-SlOp, written by Gao Xingjian and performed by The People's An Theater of Beijing, is a Chinese lyrical comedy that emerged with a group of experimental plays in Beijing in the early 1980s.' The play creates a bizarre situation of waiting, and its resemblance to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for CodOI waspointed out by certain Chinese critics soon after its premiere. Since the playwright has a background in French literature, this observation came as no surprise;' nevenheless, it played its role in a quickly aboned political campaign of "anti-bourgeois-contarnination." A Party-authorized critic used The BIIS-SIOp'S re-semblance to Beckett's play to label it anti-socialist, assuming that the futile waiting in the play shows a loss of confidence in socialism. a loss ascribed to contamination by "bourgeois, idealistic, egoistic world views.'" Although The Bus-Stop was degraded by Pany authorities in the shon-Iived campaign, more cxperimental plays, one of them by the same playwright and performed in the same theatre, were staged with enthusiastic acceptance. Contrasted with the fact that massive non-participation actually aborted a political campaign under a regime whose functioning relied heavily and continually on new campaigns, the enthusiasm for the small experimental theatres testifies to an anxiety produced by such totalitarian control and a desire to move beyond it. Situating these Chinese experimental plays in this political culture, one wonders about the meaning of waiting and how The BlIs-Stop and Waitillgfor Godot produce a comparable situation of waiting. Clearly the same situation is almost impossible to reproduce in such different perfonnances. This is especially true when one considers the different audiences in their historical contexts , expectations and resourcefulness in access to codes for cornprehension.4 Let's suppose that Waitillg for Godat were staged in China. The performance would be bound to communicate through different codes and thus would produce different meanings from those of its Western performances. The perforMudern Drama, 4 1( 1998) 461 HARRY H. KUOSHU mance of The Bus-Stop, on the contrary, is prescribed by known codes in a Chinese cultural contexL Although sharing some surface similarities, The Bus-Stop and Wailing for Godol articulate different concepts of waiting. They are, to use Umberto Eco's term, two different "cultural units," that is, differed semantic units inserted into differed cultural systems.s The Bus-Stop, nevertheless , does activate its audience's recently acquired knowledge of Godot and may serve as a cross-cultural bridge for the Chinese to enter Godot-like absurdity6 With these initial assumptions, I will first examine the differences between Waiting for Godol and The Bus-Stop and then explore the possibility of the latter as a cultural transcription, or parody, of the former. This discussion assumes that readers are familiar with Waiting for GodOI and relatively ignorant of The Bus-Stop. [t thus uses certain aspects of the former as points of departure for retrieving similar ones in the latter for comparison. The Bus-Stop is performed, as dictated by the playwright, in a small theatrein -the-round.1 The bare stage contains only a bus stop sign at the center and a fence designed to keep people in line while waiting for the bus. The play begins on a Saturday afternoon but ends God knows when, since even a watch battery will run ouL A group of people, eight all together, gradually gathers to catch a bus to get from their suburb into the big city. They wait and wait, mistaking some passing vehicles for their bus, which never comes. Their hopes for the bus are aroused and crushed time after time, but still they wail. Shock sets in when they realize that they have spent years waiting for the bus. At this point, they notice that a silent man among them has left long before, deciding to walk rather than to wait - a spotlight reveals him behind the audience climbing up to, and then walking on, a raised stand. They then regret that they waited; they should have walked to the city as he did. As...