Beckett's Chinese Progeny: Absurdity, Waiting, and the Godot Motif in Contemporary China
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Beckett’s Chinese Progeny: Absurdity, Waiting,
and the Godot Motif in Contemporary China
Rossella FERRARI
SOAS, University of London
“Nothing to be done,” Estragon states, matter-of-factly, in the very first
line of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (11) and again, repeatedly,
throughout the play. In the Western dramatic imaginary, this lapidary
statement has come to encapsulate a sense of impotence and nihilism
deprived of purpose. It betokens a world deprived of God—or a world in
which God(ot) has forever abandoned mankind to “waste and pine”
(42). This negative ontology took shape as an intellectual response to
the Western crisis of values in the aftermath of World War II—a war
that had made Europe a spiritual wasteland ravaged by the horrors of the
battlefield, the menace of nuclear disaster, the incommensurability of
the Holocaust, and the near-certainty of the demise of any metaphysical
dimension within human experience.
Why, then, would such a perception of reality as aimless and absurd
appeal to anyone in China in the heyday of post-Maoism, when the
country had just emerged from the Dark Ages of the Cultural Revolution
and totalitarian obscurantism had just subsided, heralding in the bright
vision of reform? Why would the European tradition of the absurd set
roots in the Chinese theatre at this historical juncture that was brimming
with possibilities and confidence in a new national project of economic
modernization and social reconstruction? Why, again, would this “alien”
and alienated dramaturgical mode generate its most prolific offspring in
the early 1990s, when a booming consumer revolution and increased
material comfort triggered by an expanding “socialist market economy”
made China’s dreams of progress and modernity appear, at last,
attainable and possible? And why, lastly, would there come yet another
“absurd progeny” at the turn of the millennium, when China’s imminent
access to the WTO was positioning her firmly at the forefront of
globalization? Or, put differently, why would Beckett’s archetypal
barren tree come to stand centre stage in China’s theatres at times when
“spring” had allegedly just come? Why did such sense of paralysis and
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impotence emerge at the very moment when ostensibly there was
something—indeed plenty—“to be done”?
This essay shall interrogate such paradoxes by investigating Chinese
responses to the so-called Theatre of the Absurd and, specifically, to
Waiting for Godot (1952, Godot hereafter). The controversial
introduction of the Western modernist canon in the late 1970s and early
1980s after decades of proscription through the socialist period (1949-
1976) triggered a pervasive fascination with the Godot thematic, and
engendered a range of local productions and variations on the play,
which I collectively categorize as “Godot progeny.”1
To start with, below I shall trace the reception of absurdist aesthetics
and map the basic temporalities and typologies of production,
adaptation, and “progenation” of Beckett’s work since the outset of the
post-Mao era (1976). As it will become apparent, the Godot-motif was
repeatedly invoked and reworked at times of crisis and change to allude
to long-standing expectations and hopeful projections of the future as
well as deep-seated memories, unspoken traumas, and unspeakable
truths regarding the past. Hence the latter part of this essay shall
examine a seminal production directed by Meng Jinghui in Beijing in
1991 as one of the foremost instance of such transformative-figurative
praxis of signification, and allegorical framing of the absurdist canon
within the socio-political unconscious of the Chinese nation-state.
I. Temporalities and Typologies of China’s Writing
of Waiting
Godot was one of the first dramas of the absurd to become available in
Chinese. It was translated in 1965 (Ma “Theatre of the Absurd” 87)
approximately a decade after its première at the Théâtre de Babylone in
Paris (1953). With China religiously embracing socialist literary
policies, the play stood little chance of success in those days. Following
the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, it was promptly
consigned to the proscribed underclass of the “poisonous weeds”
(counter-revolutionary literature) and consequently banned from library
shelves and theatrical stages. Still, throughout the 1960s, it continued
circulating alongside other representative works of the Western
modernist canon as a “yellow-cover book.” Made recognizable by the
yellow-brown colour of their coat, these were restricted prints of both
foreign and Chinese pre-revolutionary writings that were formally
unavailable for general readership because of their purportedly tainting
content. They were distributed only within an inner circle of high-
1
The notion of progeny was inspired by Paul Foster’s study of literary derivatives of
Lu Xun’s novella “The True Story of Ah Q” (Ah Q zhengzhuan, 1921) (Foster).
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ranking officials and intellectuals whose ideological stand was deemed
as sufficiently firm and immune to corruption. These works spelled out
heresy to the cultural apparatchiks of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP), instructed as they were in the orthodoxy of socialist realism, and
were scrutinized as negative exempla of the devious ethics of bourgeois-
capitalist thought. Yet, in point of fact, several of these prohibited texts
leaked out of the guarded libraries of the political elites and circulated
clandestinely among ordinary readers. Most crucially, this underground
canon came to constitute basic staple in the unofficial reading diet of a
generation of former Red Guards who were to become leading forces in
the cultural reconstruction of the post-Mao period.
This situation bears similarities to the complex fortunes of Beckett’s
oeuvre in Eastern Europe, where Godot has often been summoned to
symbolize long-awaited freedom from Soviet dominance and, with the
end of the Cold War, hopes for reform and reconstruction. A production
staged in Belgrade shortly after the Parisian première, for example, was
damned as decadent and obscene (Croall 73), and Vaclav Havel once
admitted that he had secretly enjoyed reading Godot “in the dark fifties,”
when the play was still proscribed in Czechoslovakia (131). Like in
China, the arrival of Godot on the Eastern European stages was
belated—the first performance was in Dresden, East Germany, in 1987.
Like in China, for a long time Beckett was “taboo and anathema,” and
his work only occasionally invoked as evidence of the superiority of
socialism over capitalism (Huber 50). This was the case of the first-ever
staging of a Beckett script in East Germany. In 1985 the Berliner
Ensemble actor Ekkehard Schall performed a double Brecht-Beckett bill
to contrast the positive model provided by the proletarian protagonist of
Brecht’s The Education of Millet (Die Erziehung der Hirse, 1950) with
the futile existence portrayed in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). Speaking of
Becket’s reception in the former GDR, Werner Huber identifies four
phases of possible responses: “refutation,” “rapprochement or
subversive appropriation,” “recovery or rescue” and “post-propriation,”
which to a certain extent echo the Irish writer’s tortuous reception in
China. In East Germany, too, intellectuals read his works despite the
ban, and writers such as Heiner Müller and Volker Braun were so
affected by those forbidden literary treats that it would later become
“their specialty to work with insinuations and oblique references to the
Beckett canon” (51). Godot would have to wait until 1988 before being
allowed into East Berlin.2
After such occasional clandestine encounters with Beckett in the
1960s and 1970s, the Chinese cultural scene witnessed to a more
2
In West Berlin, it was directed by Beckett himself in 1974.
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systematic introduction of the Theatre of the Absurd in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, alongside the earliest local experiments in absurdist
playwriting. These productions represent the first of three main peaks of
reception and dissemination of the genre and ensuing production of
derivative dramas or “progeny plays”—namely, Indigenous elaborations
of the Godot-motif. Domestic responses to the absurdist mode were
nonetheless interrupted several times during the decade by shifting
political winds and a succession of state-sponsored crusades against the
suspected harm inflicted by alien cultural intrusions. Following a
momentary disruption in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square events
of June 1989, a second, more conspicuous wave of absurdist
propagation surged in the early 1990s, accompanied by a steady flow of
translations and scholarly interventions. Finally, a third zenith was
reached at the turn of the millennium, with three new productions alone
in 1998.
These temporal stages are matched by three modes of dissemination
of the Godot-motif and the subsequent generation of local productions,
hybrid adaptations, and progeny plays. The first mode relates to a
number of Chinese-language performances of Godot that display
varying degrees of adaptation with regard to script and setting, and are
mostly based on the 1960s translation by Shi Xianrong. These include a
1986 production directed by Chen Jialin at the Shanghai Theatre
Academy, Meng Jinghui’s 1991 production at the Central Academy of
Drama, a 1998 version by Ren Ming at Beijing People’s Art Theatre
starring two females in the lead roles, and an independent production by
Zhang Xian, Li Rong, and Wang Jingguo, which was performed in 2001
at the Hard Han Café Theatre in Shanghai by an all-female cast. In
2003, Meng conceived a mass version with a cast of over a hundred
actors called A Hundred People Waiting for Godot (Yibai ge ren
dengdai Geduo), whose rehearsals were nonetheless suspended because
of the SARS outbreak and never rescheduled.
The second modality pertains to hybrid versions whose titles plainly
refer to their overseas progenitor and retain most of its dialogue and
semantic connotations, and yet are too altered, structurally, to be
categorized simply as productions of Beckett’s original. One such
crossbreed is Lin Zhaohua’s Three Sisters Waiting for Godot (San zimei
dengdai Geduo, 1998), which merges lines and characters from
Chekhov and Beckett. A more recent manifestation is Godot Cometh
(Dengdao Geduo), whose title plays with the assonance of the Chinese
verbs dao (to come) and dai (to wait). The play was staged to critical
acclaim at the Beckett Centenary Festival held at the Shanghai Dramatic
Arts Centre in 2006 alongside an “experimental opera” version of Godot
by renowned Taiwanese performer Wu Hsing-kuo. Two years earlier the
Shanghainese audience also had the opportunity to see a classic and
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celebrated production by Walter Asmus with Dublin’s Gate Theatre.
The Irish version won rave reviews in Shanghai and Beijing and “the
mere fact of the production being there emphasized the marked
difference in attitude towards the play from that of twenty years before,
when it had been banned” (Croall 101).3 Asmus noted that the role of
Lucky resonated with Chinese audiences because the portrayal of “this
poor creature with a rope round his neck…had political implications for
them” (101).
Written in 2004 by emerging dramatist Li Ran and produced by the
Shanghai-based Finalmente Theatre Company (Feinar jutuan), Godot
Cometh is a meta-play of parody and deconstruction about two actors
named Vladimir and Estragon who perform excerpts of Godot for the
visitors of an amusement park. First a man and then a woman interrupt
the proceedings claiming that they are, in fact, Godot, but Vladimir and
Estragon murder them both for fear that if Godot really came the tourist
show would lose its appeal and they might consequently lose their jobs.
Beckett himself also appears as a character, further adding to the
metatheatrical quality of the play (Liu 87). Li’s experiment resonates
with earlier European attempts at writing prequels, sequels or other
types of derivatives. The deliberate vagueness and open-endedness of
the dramatic situation has prompted a number of alternative speculations
on the fates of the characters before, after, and beyond the scenario
supplied by Beckett. Instances are Godot Has Come (Godo je došao,
1966) by the Serbian Miodrag Bulatović, Alan Titley’s Godot Turns Up
(1990), Daniel Curzon’s Godot Arrives (1999), and The Last Godot (Le
dernier Godot/Ultimul Godot) by the French-Rumanian Matei Vişniec.
Like Li’s rewriting, the latter features both Godot and his author as
characters.
The third mode of propagation—or, in this precise instance,
progenation—concerns works by Chinese playwrights in which the
basic action and symbolism are patently indebted to Godot. Their
foreign paternity may not be revealed by their titles nor acknowledged
by their authors, yet by situating the act of waiting at their core “as form
and motif” (Tam 43) they can be legitimately categorized as progeny
plays. Instances of local writing of waiting based on Beckett’s Urtext
are The Bus Stop (Chezhan, 1983) by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian and
Extreme Mahjong (Feichang majiang, 1998-2000) by Li Liuyi. Zhang
Xian’s The Owl in the Room (Wuli de maoutouying, 1987) and Yue
Meiqin’s The Woman Left Behind (Liushou nüshi, 1991) can also be
viewed as Godot-derivatives (Wu 41). About Asian Imagination, or an
Ode, or an Etude (Guanyu Yazhou de xiangxiang huozhe songge huozhe
3
Croall refers to the 1983 ban on The Bus Stop.
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lianxiqu), produced by Chinese avant-garde director Mou Sen in Tokyo
in 1996, may fit as well into this category; if not in strict textual terms—
most of his works are unscripted—at least conceptually. “Asia” and
“waiting” were the key motifs of the performance, and Mou required his
pan-Asian cast of Chinese, Japanese and Korean actors to improvise on
lines from Godot mentioning the play’s archetypical barren tree, along
with material from a news story about a team of Japanese volunteers
planting trees in North-western China. The Beckett excerpts were
combined with comments by one volunteer about the endless time they
would have to wait before the fruits of their labour could be seen. The
dialogues blended with an electronic soundscape of environmental-
abstract noises, which was likewise designed to induce an impression of
time, waiting, and duration. An intermittent voiceover of a woman
singing of perpetually waiting for her husband to return from World
War II was also inserted. The husband had died long before, but her
waiting was forever undying (Mou).
Comparable examples of productive progenation of Godot’s core
motifs can be drawn from European performance history. An oft-cited
one is Ils allaient obscurs sous la nuit solitaire by Bernard Pautrat,
directed by André Engel with the National Theatre of Strasburg in 1979.
The set was transposed to a deserted hangar and the cast comprised ten
characters—Gogo, Didi, Pozzo, Lucky, and six new ones. The script
merged original with newly-written lines relating to current social
concerns to conjure up, as the Dramaturge explained, “a faithful, black
picture of our time, following the tone set by all of Beckett’s works”
(Murch 191). Godot’s legacy is also apparent in the work of a number of
contemporary authors ranging from Pinter to Stoppard, Braun, and
Müller. One interesting example for us is a 1983 drama by the East
German Christoph Hein named after the title of Lu Xun’s “The True
Story of Ah Q.” Hein’s Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q tells of two self-
styled anarchists waiting for the revolution which marked the end of the
Chinese empire in 1911. The revolution, however, passes without them
even noticing and their “revolutionary master,” too, never materializes
(Huber 52).
Albeit unrelated to the Godot-motif, several other contemporary
Chinese dramas have been labelled as “absurd” (huangdan), for instance
Wei Minglun’s “Sichuan opera of the absurd” (Pan Jinlian, 1986). Later
works such as Crowded (Yongji, 1994) by Zhang Xian, Quiet after the
Storm (Yuguo tianqing, 1997) by Li Liuyi, and the Trilogy of Idlers
(Xianren sanbuqu) by Guo Shixing display situations and devices that
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may as well be traced back to the European absurdist tradition.4 Some
post-exile plays by Gao Xingjian such as Between Life and Death
(Shengsi jie, 1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (Duihua yu fanjie, 1993),
and The Man Who Questions Death (Kouwen siwang, 2004) exhibit a
propensity for absurdity and paradox that may be ascribed to both
foreign sources—especially given that Gao has been an active reader
and translator of French absurd drama—and to the non-rationalist
philosophy and relativistic thinking of Daoism and Zen Buddhism.5 In
particular, the existential quest of the characters in The Other Shore
(Bi’an, 1986) reveals an ambiguity of purpose that brings it close,
symbolically, to the search for Godot. Like the multiple signifier
“Godot” in Beckett, the Buddhist concept of “other shore” takes on a
variety of meanings in Gao. Overall, as the above mapping indicates,
such diversity in modality and scope of production—ranging from
small-size independent performances to large-scale ones sponsored by
major state theatres—underscores the pervasive hold of Godot on the
Chinese dramatic imagination in the contemporary era.
II. The Coming and Circulation of Godot
As mentioned previously, the systematic introduction of the absurdist
corpus commenced at the turn of the 1980s. An essay on the “school of
the absurd” (huangdan pai) appeared in World Literature (Shijie
wenxue) in 1978, and a few drama collections in Chinese translation
were published shortly afterwards (Tay 67). One featured a reissue of
the 1960s translation of Godot by Shi Xianrong, who also edited the
volume. In his foreword, Shi defined the Theatre of the Absurd as a
decadent capitalist aesthetics tarnished by “shattered ideals, broken
faith, helplessness, hysteria,” and a “typical ideological manifestation of
a class doomed to destruction” (Ma “Theatre of the Absurd” 80). The
philosophical foundations of the genre, and particularly its perceived
connections with existentialism, were deemed as nihilistic, anti-Marxist,
and subversive of the socialist realist orthodoxy (Zhang 221-23). Shi’s
translation, moreover, was purged of some inappropriate sexual
vocabulary such as a reference to an erection (235). Incidentally,
Beckett’s own English version of 1955 had undergone a similar editing,
as the Lord Chamberlain demanded this and other indecencies to be
removed before allowing a public performance (Bair 445). Nonetheless,
the increased liberalism granted by the post-Maoist government in the
4
The trilogy comprises Bird Men (Niaoren, 1993), Chess Men (Qiren, 1996), and Fish
Men (Yuren, 1997). Chen Jide describes Guo’s dramaturgy as one of “paradox,
alienation, and absurdity” (343).
5
After the Viennese première of 1992 Dialogue and Rebuttal was labelled by the press
as “Zen in the Theatre of the Absurd” (Quah 19).
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early stages of consolidation of the new political leadership allowed
further manifestations of the absurd to penetrate the Chinese theatrical
sphere.6
The Bus Stop by Gao Xingjian directed by Lin Zhaohua at Beijing
People’s Art Theatre in 1983, was produced even before Godot itself
ever appeared on a Chinese stage. This first manifestation of Godot
progeny inaugurated a new trend of adaptation of the Beckettian trope of
waiting within China’s own dramaturgy. In spite of Gao’s dismissal of
any direct affiliation, this lyrical tragicomedy is widely regarded as a
Chinese variant of Beckett’s masterpiece on account of several
semantic, structural, and symbolic affinities. The Bus Stop tells of a
crowd of people who wait endlessly for a bus that never comes. Halfway
through the play the enigmatic character of the Silent Man leaves, quiet
and unnoticed, accompanied by a musical score that evokes “a kind of
pain and a stubborn searching and longing” (Gao Bus Stop 20-21). The
others keep waiting forever and, possibly, in vain. In addition to surface
similarities, a number of significant differences have also been noted
with respect to the play’s European parentage. Scholars have argued that
Chinese absurdism rejects anti-theatre and maintains a degree of
logicality, finality, and social concern. Action—as a classic rule of
drama—is still relevant, dialogue is less abstract, and the act of waiting
is more constructive and purposeful in Gao than in Beckett (Zhao
Towards 74; Wu 41).
The extreme stylistic foreignness of the Theatre of the Absurd has
also been discussed as factor restraining Godot’s incursion into Chinese
territory. Unlike the works of Shakespeare and Brecht, which became
immensely popular in the 1980s and were studied alongside a range of
native theatrical forms, there were neither aesthetic connections nor
shared ideological foundations to facilitate Beckett’s reception (Zhang
211). Still, the real concern was not as much stylistic or related to
divergent epistemologies and cultural sensitivities as it was to questions
of ideological legitimacy and anxiety over the counter-discursive
potential of the foreign Other vis-à-vis the national Self. Commenting
on the unmatched global circulation of Godot, Enoch Brater notes that
its political potential has often been exposed in production and exploited
to local ends (149), especially in areas of political conflict and social
6
In 1982, Red Nose (Hong bizi) by Taiwanese dramatist Yao Yiwei was staged in
Beijing by Chen Yong with the China Youth Art Theatre. This prodction was
possibly the first performed in the PRC of a Chinese-language script dealing with
absurdity and existential alienation. In 1985, The Weakling (Rouzhe) by Ma Sen, also
Taiwanese, was staged in Nanjing and his “plays of the absurd” were positively
reviewed by leading critic Lin Kehuan in the official journal Play Scripts (Juben)
(Ma “Theatre of the Absurd” 81).
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unrest such as the Middle East, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and,
indeed, Asia. As Athol Fugard told the (Black) cast of his 1962 South
African version, “Vladimir and Estragon must have read the accounts of
the Nuremberg trials—or else they were at Sharpeville or were the first
in at Auschwitz. Choose your horror—they know all about it” (148).7
In the same way as the European authors who are now gathered
under the absurdist umbrella strived to dramatize the metaphysical
anguish of a world whose faith in the grands récits of modernity was
smashed by the rise of totalitarianisms and the horrors of the war,
Chinese writers in the post-Mao period embraced absurdist aesthetics as
an alternative epistemological framework through which to explore, and
possibly exorcize, their own traumatic past and the recent tragedies of
the Cultural Revolution. The question with The Bus Stop, however, was
that not only did it point to the excesses of an officially-condemned and
forever-gone past—the “lost ten years,” as the revolutionary decade is
frequently referred to—but also to the persistence of systemic fallacies
and empty ideologies in the present. The production was halted after a
few performances and attacked for its suspected anti-socialist overtones.
Gao was faulted for endorsing a philosophy of “nihilism” and promoting
“deviant works which distort history, twist the facts, spread all kinds of
negative, pessimistic, corrupt, and vulgar ideas and propagate all manner
of bourgeois, idealistic, egoistic world views”—as conservative critic
He Wen argued (Tay 71). Gao and Lin fuelled the polemics further by
deliberately associating their experiment with the work of Lu Xun, the
“father” of modern Chinese literature—a comparison that the CCP
ideologues strongly resisted (73). Lu’s lyrical-symbolist playlet The
Passer-by (Guoke, 1925) was staged as a prelude to The Bus Stop and
the title role was assigned to the same actor who impersonated the
much-discussed character of the Silent Man. Undoubtedly, besides its
absurdist parentage Gao’s play partakes in both style and mood of the
legacy of The Passer-by—possibly the earliest manifestation of
“Chinese Theatre of the Absurd” ante litteram.
Intense debates over Western modernism, Marxist humanism, and
socialist alienation were sweeping through China’s political and cultural
circles at the time. With its multiple ambiguities, allegorical
suggestions, and lack of closure The Bus Stop presented hard-line critics
with “a dramatic illustration of bourgeois humanist individualism with
an overall negation of the socialist practice and history of contemporary
China” (Yan xvii). Gao was criticized during the Anti-Spiritual
Pollution campaign of 1983-84 and his play was branded by officials as
7
On Fugard’s and other political productions of Godot such as Ilan Ronen’s in Haifa
(1984) and Susan Sontag’s in Sarajevo (1993); see also Croall (chapter 8) and
Taylor-Batty (chapter 3).
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the “most poisonous” work to appear on a Chinese stage since the
establishment of the PRC in 1949 (Gao Case 147). Speaking of parallel
developments in poetry—the polemics over modernism originated from
attacks against the new genre of Obscure Poetry (Menglong shi)—
Michelle Yeh suggests that this vehement institutional damning of
harmful foreign influence served a fundamental strategic function. To
admit that the new literature owed its emergence—as well as
subversiveness—“more to intrinsic factors than to external influence”
was tantamount to recognize “the existence of crises, such as identity
crisis, disintegration of values, alienation, and dehumanization,
comparable to those that gave rise to modernism in the West,” and the
persistence “of old problems that the government did not wish to admit”
(391).
The 1980s witnessed a succession of campaigns that reflected
shifting ideological moods and power struggles within the leadership—
cycles of openings and closures, liberalism and conservatism, political
winters and springs that echoed the futilely circular temporality of
Godot. These movements—from the early modernism-versus-realism
debates of 1981-82 to the harsher campaign against bourgeois liberalism
of 1986-87—fuelled “a sense of mission” (Zhao Towards 70) among the
progressive sectors of the intelligentsia and paid “a great service to the
new art and literature by creating its heroes” (72). However, they also
triggered a pervasive loss of confidence in the new regime. As it
appeared, “Godot”—that is, free will, civil society, intellectual
autonomy, liberal democracy—was always on the verge of coming, but
never did. This crisis of faith engendered a discursive paralysis
comparable to that voiced by Estragon when he advises: “Don’t let’s do
anything. It’s safer” (Beckett 19). Or, alternatively, a sense of
disaffection and cynical refusal of any more utopias. As “stray youth”
novelist Xu Xing writes in Variations Without a Theme (Wuzhuti
bianzou, 1985): “I am not clear what I want apart from what I’ve
got…What’s more annoying is that I am not waiting for anything”
(Zhao Lost Boat 11).
Somewhat ironically, the first Chinese-language performance of
Godot occurred precisely in the midst of one such campaign against
bourgeois liberalism. As pro-democracy student demonstrations swept
through China’s cities and leading intellectuals were attacked for their
support of political reform, Beckett’s poignant meditation on hope in
hopelessness went onstage at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in
December 1986.8 The journal Shanghai Drama (Shanghai xiju)
welcomed the production as one of the top-ten cultural events of the
8
It was briefly revived at the Changjiang Theatre in January 1987.
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year (Liu 14). China’s first Godot, however, largely fell into the
exemplary-educational rubric that was typical of mainstream state-
sponsored drama. The purpose of director Chen Jialin, a theatre
professor trained in the Soviet-Stanislavskian tradition, was chiefly
didactic and his interpretation differed little from customary
understandings of the play as symptomatic of the ethical crisis of
Western civilization (Zhang 237-39). Chen made amendments to make
the text more palatable to a Chinese audience and, possibly, more
ideologically digestible for the regime. His production featured original
music and lyrics by Ouyang Zhanzhi, dance sequences, and a range of
technical and gestural expedients patently suggestive of Beijing Opera.
Verses by Tang poet Chen Ziang (661-702) on the theme of solitude
were added to evoke greater familiarity among viewers and concurrently
reflect the experience of Beckett’s tramps’ loneliness (244). In his
directorial notes, Chen categorizes Godot as a “tragic farce” (naobeiju)
(241) and cautiously incorporates the (orthodox) notion of realism in his
description of the (unorthodox) abstract poetics of the absurd and the
waiting-motif, which he understands as “a goal that transcends time and
space, transcends national boundaries, and even transcends timelessness
itself…to reflect mankind’s shared emotions” (Lo 238). Yet there is no
mention of the inherent pessimism, ontological negativity, and demise
of purpose implied by Beckett’s conception.9
Experiments with modernist aesthetics were temporarily disrupted by
the tragic Beijing Spring of 1989, when hundreds of youths grew tired
of wasting time “in idle discourse,” as Vladimir would have said
(Beckett 74). Surely, the Party’s call for a “healthy proliferation” of
“politically harmless, artistically superior, crowd-pleasing works” (Kaye
32-33) did not provide fertile ground for further journeys into absurdity.
The first half of the 1990s witnessed nonetheless a second, more
conspicuous tide of reception. The Theatre of the Absurd resurfaced as a
driving force in the avant-garde renaissance of the post-Tiananmen
phase as a genuine “absurdist fever” spread through the theatre circles—
professional and amateur, official and underground. Lin Yinyu was the
first professional director to stage dramas of the absurd in Beijing with
productions of Pinter’s The Lovers and Ionesco’s The Chairs at the
Central Academy of Drama in 1991. The absurdist repertoire dominated
the unofficial theatre season organized in the same year by a group of
graduate students and would-be celebrities including directors Meng
Jinghui and Zhang Yang and actors Hu Jun and Guo Tao. The
9
Attempts at familiarizing Beckett for the benefit of Chinese theatre-goers are also
apparent in scholarly commentaries such as Liao Kedui’s. Liao describes Godot as a
tragic farce and the tramps as “comic” characters close to Chinese cross-talk
(xiangsheng) and comic banter (huaji). (Liao).
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programme featured productions of Pinter’s The Dumbwaiter and
Landscape and Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano alongside original Chinese-
language plays. Meng’s groundbreaking edition of Godot also premièred
in 1991, followed in 1993 by a version of Genet’s The Balcony with the
Central Experimental Theatre.
Together with Lin Zhaohua’s innovative actors/puppets rendering of
Dürrenmatt’s Romulus the Great (1992), Meng’s take on Genet provides
a most significant instance of anti-sublime and anti-heroic theatre of the
post-Tiananmen period, owing to its scathing debunking of sanctioned
historiographies and official mythmaking. After 1989, the Theatre of the
Absurd became a farcical mask and hall of mirrors by which anti-
institutional dissent and social critique can be both concealed and
reflected. As one critic observed, the blending of absurdity and farce
constituted a key tactics in early-1990s theatre. The farcical cover-up
enabled audiences “to respond to densely political passages
sympathetically and without restraint” and “push all dangerous thoughts
into the emptiness of hilarity. This, at least, is safe” (Ma Shuiyue 225).
A foreign extra-cultural form thus came to function as a self-reflexive
signifier of intra-cultural predicaments.
Martin Esslin writes that the hallmark of the absurd as both a
dramaturgical convention and epistemological approach rests on the
realization that the certainties of the past “have been swept away, that
they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited
as cheap and somewhat childish illusions” (16). Accordingly, this
second wave of theatrical xenophilia did not merely provide a channel
for stylistic innovation but also a platform for counter-discourse. It is no
accident that a generation of artists who had witnessed the hysteria of
the Cultural Revolution as children and the Tiananmen bloodshed as
adults embraced the aesthetics of the absurd as a privileged allegorical
ground in which to visualize the dystopian mood of a time when—just
as Beckett’s lanky tree—“the spring has run dry” (Bei 11).10 For Walter
Benjamin allegory exposes a sense of melancholy and apprehension for
transience and decline, of history as ruin, fragment, and “irresistible
decay,” (178) for “in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies
hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything
about history that…has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is
expressed in a face” (166)—a mask of death. The irrational
epistemology and circular inconsequentiality of absurd drama functioned
as allegorical inscriptions of the public façade, which captured the
traumatic unconscious of a nation in historically schizophrenic times.
10
Verse from Bei Dao’s poem “Requiem,” for the victims of Tiananmen.
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The implementation of the peculiar brand of postsocialist capitalism
promoted by the new leadership ignited a relentless escalation of
commodity economy and global mass culture throughout the decade.
Amidst pressing financial concerns and growing marginalization in an
increasingly aggressive culture industry, the avant-garde started
generating its first martyrs alongside its first celebrities. The sudden
withdrawal of maverick director Mou Sen from the theatre ranks in 1997
marked the end of an era for experimental theatre, while at the turn of
the century Meng Jinghui’s carnivalizing excursions into pop avant-
garde aesthetics propelled the scene into a new phase of prosperity. A
variety of cultural factors and socio-economic transformations triggered
new hopes and opportunities as the decade drew to a close, along with
new challenges and fears. At this juncture, Godot was once more
invoked as the ineffable icon of a conflicting national unconscious, and
the writing of waiting re-entered the stage as a meta-comment on the
state of affairs of art and culture at the fin-de-siècle.
The independent production of Three Sisters Waiting for Godot
(1998) seemed to voice the spiritual-existential side of the matter. Lin
Zhaohua’s “elegiac Godot” stood on the Beijing stage as nostalgic
testament to the idealism of the previous decade and a self-reflexive
meditation on the decline of high art and culture. If anything, resounding
failure at the box-office and widespread dissatisfaction with its
complexity and obscurity provided bitter evidence to the defeatist
implications and melancholic mood of the performance. As stage
designer Yi Liming admitted: “Not many of our audiences dare to face
the truth in the same way as Vladimir does. This type of theatre no
longer excites hearts and may even induce gloom. But this is the reality
of experimental theatre today” (11). In contrast, the “pop Godot”
rendition by Ren Ming of the same year unveiled the practical-
materialistic side of China’s sociocultural makeover. Vladimir and
Estragon were cast as two fashionably dressed, wildly dancing young
women “waiting for employment,” thereby addressing a topical concern
of a society in which unemployment was still a relatively recent
phenomenon. Consistent with such contemporary accent, the desolate
country road that provides the original set for the tramps’ vicissitudes
was changed into a night club. Beckett’s abstract meditation on human
fate turned into a discussion of concrete matters—a realistic mirror on
the hedonistic desires of China at the crossroads of planned and market
economy, socialist and commodity culture. A comparable approach
informed Zhang Xian’s fully cross-gender version of 2001. Zhang
injected a deliberate queer subtext into Beckett’s text alongside an ultra-
feminine component. Though the original structure, scenery and (male)
names were maintained, all roles were changed into females to establish
a critique of gender roles. Two attractive ladies in flashy wigs and
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miniskirts played Vladimir and Estragon, Godot was imagined as a sort
of materialistic-age variant of Prince Charming, and Pozzo and Lucky’s
sadomasochistic union served to expose unbalanced sex-and-power
relations. Defined by the producers as “alternative theatre of the soap-
opera age” merging an absurdist essence and a “consumerist packaging”
(Liu 68), this small-scale rendition emphasized as well social
commentary over metaphysical musing to reflect the materialistic
yearnings and practical concerns of China’s youth in a newly globalized
environment.
No doubt these productions would have horrified Beckett, as
resistant as he was to any deviation from his original intentions. Beckett
used to get “worried by the very sound of the word ‘adaptation,’” and
gained a reputation as “an arch-controller” of his work (Knowlson 398,
691)—one that the Beckett Estate has contributed to preserve after his
death by threatening to sue anyone who radically modifies his writings
without permission. One issue that displeased him the most was gender
change, and the casting of females in roles that he had originally
conceived as male. Much to his chagrin, however, cross-gender
productions of Godot became increasingly popular during his lifetime,
which led him to resort to legal measures on occasion (694-95).
Li Liuyi’s progeny play Extreme Mahjong, written in 1998 and first
staged in 2000, summed up the pessimist-nostalgic and practical-
futuristic moods by fleshing out both sides of China’s dualistic figuration
of Godot as a Janus face. Extreme Mahjong displays a complex
absurdist genealogy. Besides being the most clearly traceable local
derivative of Godot after The Bus Stop, it also suggests connections with
Beckett’s Endgame and Pinter’s “comedies of menace” such as The
Dumbwaiter. The play tells the fates of four sworn brothers on the eve
of their last mahjong game. They have decided to abandon the gaming
world and engage in more socially meaningful activities. However, the
elusive Second Brother who, like Godot, is possibly real or possibly
“only a shadow” (Li “Feichang majiang” 92), does not arrive. As the
others wait, ominous noises from squeaky elevators and leaking toilets
enhance the dramatic tension. Gradually, the (in)action unfolds into a
hallucinatory state of disquiet, trepidation and suspicion until it becomes
apparent that Second Brother is dead and the others are responsible for
the murder. Extreme Mahjong displays a melancholic and meditative
side as it simultaneously partakes of global-pop aesthetics. The basic
situation is abstract, existentialist, and still aligned with the search for
meaning and alternative metaphysical dimensions of the heyday of post-
Maoism. Yet the hideout ambience of the setting, its refined but
decadent décor, the trope of brotherhood, and the implication of murder
evoke the gangster and Triad blockbusters of Hollywood and Hong
Kong. A mixed sense of anxiety, decadence, and gloom interlocked with
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anticipation and hope for resurgence encapsulates as well a distinctive
millennial sensibility. The number of the room in which the action takes
place—1911—recalls the year of the demise of the Chinese empire and
so strengthens the allusive subtext further by metaphorically defining
the play as an attempt to draw up a balance of China’s century-long race
into modernity.
As it appears, the ambiguity of the Godot-motif and the dialectical
nature of the act of waiting presented Chinese artists with an ideal trope
by which to articulate a complex range of concerns through the post-
Mao period. Waiting can be positive, as it implies potential, or negative,
as it triggers tedium and anguish over the futile passing of time. As
Kwok-kwan Tam observes: “The act of waiting is an absurd combination
of doing something and doing nothing” (59), thus reflecting both change
and stasis. The imagination of Godot aptly encapsulates such
paradoxical dualism: Godot can signify salvation but also a chimera of
salvation. The key, however, “is not Godot but the subject of waiting
and the hope, frustration and anxiety” it causes (45)—hence the mythic
contours of the Godot motif. The works surveyed here highlight the
ambivalence of hope, for the characters and their condition do not
necessarily change for the better and often do change for the worse. Just
like China’s rush toward global modernity and economic reform, change
presents a dazzling face of prosperity and a face of greyness and ruin.
The face of those who wander and end up worse—Pozzo, Lucky and
possibly the Silent Man—or those who wait forever for a fantasy—the
tramps, the three sisters, the crowd at the bus stop, and the mahjong
players. Overall, the writing of waiting is configured as a “device of
contrast and paradox” (46) that is employed repeatedly, and often self-
reflexively, at critical moments of change. As further illustrated by
Meng Jinghui’s production examined below, the Godot thematic
circulated through various modalities and times to voice the prospects,
predicaments and political realities of a nation in transition.
III. An Empty Space. A Tree. Evening.
Godot in Post-Tiananmen Beijing
Meng’s 1991 version marked the first staging of Godot in Beijing and,
to this date, it is the sole Chinese rendition of the play that has been
performed abroad.11 As one of the most accomplished and controversial
local readings of Beckett’s masterpiece, it was instrumental in launching
the career of one of China’s leading avant-garde directors. In contrast
11
In March 1993, it participated in the “China Avant-garde” exhibit at the House of
World Cultures in Berlin. There it was performed three times, and another at the
Kammertheater in Neubrandenburg.
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with the cautious approach favoured by Chen Jialin in 1986, Meng
turned Beckett’s tragicomedy into a staged exercise in dissent and a
vehicle for symbolic traumatic disclosure. Beckett’s metaphysical
rumination on the futility of human purpose in a world deprived of God
became a disturbing allegory of the rage and repression of China’s youth
in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and a touching
tribute to its martyrs. Godot stood on the Beijing stage not only as a
universal statement of transcendental loss but also as a contextual rite of
remembrance endowed with manifest anamnestic and apotropaic
functions, in which actors turned temporarily into exorcists and the stage
into a ritual site. Meng engaged in a conceptual study of institutional
domination and psychophysical disease to expose a crisis of agency
within the Chinese socio-intellectual body through and in the wake of
the 1989 incident, and unearth a field of tension between macro- and
micro-histories, macro- and micro-powers. Indeed, Beckett’s dramaturgy
lends itself well to anti-hegemonic purposes for “by asserting that truth
and meaning per se are illusory” and therefore presenting ideology as a
form of false consciousness, “Beckett undermines the very ground on
which it stands, providing an epistemological weapon for those who
seek to oppose it” (Counsell 141).
In Meng’s mise-en-scène, Beckett’s iconic country road becomes an
all-white empty space bathed in bright light. A white rectangular block
replaces the mound on which Estragon sits at the outset of Act One, and
a spindly white tree hangs upside down from the ceiling. A grand piano
stands at one corner and an old bicycle lies on its head at the opposite
end. Two white chairs and two wheels scattered on the floor complete
the minimalist decor. A detail of Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (Spring)
is reproduced on the backdoor curtain—perhaps as an allusion to the
political spring that never came in 1989, as it never comes in this
production. Whereas in Beckett the barren tree grows some leaves in
Act Two, as a faint indication of renewal in a desolate landscape, here it
remains dead all along, thereby erasing the sole sign of hope of the
entire play. The original dreamlike scenery becomes an aseptic
enclosure drenched in carceral and clinical hues, which evokes the
disciplinary institutions investigated by Michel Foucault in Madness
and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and other works. Here, as in
Foucault, discipline is imparted by way of hierarchical surveillance and
normalizing judgement. Godot watches over Vladimir and Estragon not
only through emissaries and alter-egos but also through a scheme of
reward and retribution that invisibly directs their behaviour and ensures
their submission. Godot is presented as highly ambivalent in Meng’s
production. Godot stands for freedom, renewal and self-realization, but
he is also a perpetrator of fear, violence, and death. As Katherine
Burkman argues, Godot is “a symbol of that force which sometimes
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does take shape and changes our lives, bringing what Estragon and
Vladimir hope may be salvation or what they sometimes fear may be
damnation” (30). Godot may come as a saviour and redeemer but also
“as a false messiah… an evil or negative force to be exorcised” (30).
Countless hypotheses have been advanced to explain the ambiguous
identity of the play’s absent protagonist. Christian interpretations take
Godot as a symbol for God or an otherwise divine entity endowed with
redemptive powers (Fletcher 51). Yet, Godot also stands for material
well-being and comes across at times as a rather secular figure—he has
family, friends, agents, correspondents, and a bank account (Beckett
20)—and his aura of sanctity is obscured by touches of arbitrariness and
unconcern. Like the God of Lucky’s paradigmatic “think” speech,
Godot lets the tramps “waste and pine” for no apparent reason. As
Vladimir states, “we are waiting for Godot to come…Or for night to
fall” (74)—night standing for oblivion, and death. Beckett’s affinity
with tropes of death and decay is further strengthened in Meng’s
rendition, whose mood constantly fluctuates between degeneration and
renewal, hope and despair, crude violence and gentle lyricism or—as
Meng phrases it—“an alarming softness, an ambiguous sharpness”
(Meng Xianfeng 359). Godot comes at last in this version, yet he does
not come as the final realization of an ideal. He comes after all ideals
have been shattered, and only mourning is left. Godot appears on the
Beijing stage as a false Messiah that must be forced out.
In The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin discusses Herbert Blau’s
1957 production of Godot at the San Quentin penitentiary in San
Francisco. He observes that despite its hermeticism Beckett’s text
resonated deeply with the convicts, who identified Godot as a reference
to “society” and “the outside” and the tramps’ excruciating routines as
evocations of their own experiences of waiting, expectation, and
disillusionment. The convicts knew what “waiting” was, and knew that
“if Godot finally came, he would only be a disappointment” (14).
Similarly, in Beijing, the tramps’ condition was recognized as reflecting
China’s own recent traumas and social predicaments, and the
performance taken as a rare opportunity for collective mourning and
remembrance. Godot—the hope that hundreds of Chinese had placed in
their future, their country, and their rulers—did come at last from “the
outside.” As for the San Quentin convicts, however, such final
intervention was merely one of tragic disappointment.
The opening scene immediately underscores such ontological
duplicity while introducing the trope of institutional violence which, I
argue, forms a central element in Meng’s reading of Beckett. Here and
at each subsequent mention of the play’s central motif—that of
waiting—and of the elusive figure that stands for all that the characters
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are waiting for—Godot—a bell shrieks ominously, as a call to order and
submission and signifier of a threatening force, of a hidden but
persistent gaze. Each time Estragon throws himself onto the floor in fear
and despair. As the tramps keep arguing and waiting, Estragon lies
down on the white block, as dead, while Vladimir tears his newspaper
apart and strikes at the air with his umbrella as if he were battling an
invisible enemy, like a Don Quixote tilting at windmills. After Estragon
screams out his declaration of impotence—“No use struggling… No use
wriggling… Nothing to be done” (Beckett 22)—a cry is heard and
Pozzo enters blowing a whip and a whistle, as yet another aural effect
employed in this production to announce the manifestation of a
threatening force. Pozzo is styled to resemble an affluent bureaucrat or
entrepreneur and imparts orders like an army leader. In contrast, Lucky
is cast as a traumatized lunatic whose moods swing constantly from
apathy to fury. His eyes are lost in emptiness; he bites his hands and
does not utter a word. Clearly, Meng engages Beckett’s portrayal of
power relations as embodied in the symbiotic co-dependence of
Pozzo/the master and Lucky/the servant and Vladimir and Estragon’s
love-hate bond to reflect the conflicting relations between government
and citizens through and in the wake of the Tiananmen events.
Tellingly, Pozzo’s plan of doing away with Lucky—“I am perhaps not
particularly human, but who cares?” (29)—inflames Vladimir’s outright
indignation. Pozzo chastises his former “good angel” because he has
questioned his authority, in the same way as hundreds of youths
questioned the power of the Chinese Party-State in 1989.
Lucky, hitherto silent and still, suddenly revolts and starts hitting the
block on which Pozzo is sitting. His celebrated “think” speech marks the
sole occasion in which he, as emblem of the subaltern, is able to
articulate some form of protest, and his debunking of rational discourse
stands as an act of resistance against a power regime that can neither
understand nor feel for its subjects. As a channel of discourse, language
entails profound hegemonic functions, so man’s engagement with
language becomes “inevitably political… [and] implicated in operations
of power” (Counsell 134). The marginalized subject thus attempts to
demystify power by subverting the means by which power constructs
and imparts its truths. Lucky struggles at first to make himself heard, but
the more he speaks the more frenzied he becomes, as if possessed by a
malicious force and gone insane. And the more Lucky speaks/thinks, the
more Pozzo suffers. This counter-discursive aspect is highlighted here
and in other instances not only verbally but also, and most frequently,
physically. As he cries out his unruly indictment against a cruel power
“who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia”
(Beckett 42) watches passively over the struggles of mankind, Lucky
grabs the two wheels that are scattered on the floor and throws them up
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to the ceiling, then forces the bicycle wheels to spin increasingly
faster—such an aggressive and inflated gestus clearly functioning as a
physical externalization of a distressed mental state. Nonetheless,
Lucky’s rebellion produces yet another outburst of coercion. Pozzo
kicks him and blocks his mouth while blowing his whistle, and Vladimir
and Estragon—who stand for some sort of universal citizenry—assist
Pozzo in silencing Lucky’s protest, thereby underscoring their
ambivalent perception of authority and incongruous loyalty to its
victims. This chaotic yet compelling utterance marks Lucky’s last effort
at independent action, speech, and thought. By the time of his second
appearance, Lucky has been deprived of his voice, just as Pozzo has lost
his vision. The oppressed have been silenced and the oppressor is no
longer able to see the plight of his subjects.
A crucial modification with respect to tropes of institutional
surveillance and psychophysical pathology can be seen in the
replacement of Beckett’s Boy messenger with a pair of identical twin
sisters dressed in white medical uniforms, who at each appearance
deliver their lines unemotionally and in unison. Besides denying the
barren tree its chance for a second spring, Meng also deprives the
tramps of the only feeble sign of optimism that Beckett had granted
them. There is no innocence left in this colourless universe, thus the
original carrier of hope, or divine envoy, is refashioned as the robotic
emissary of a normalizing institution—the clinic, the asylum, and, by
extension, the overall machinery of hegemonic power. This emendation
further suggests that authority cannot only be enforced from above, but
needs to be sustained from below by compliant social agents who share
accountability with the regime—Pozzo and the nurses on the theatre
stage, police forces and acquiescent members of society in the theatre of
life. The deployment of a twin messenger—namely, a doppelgänger—
underscores as well the profound ambiguity ascribed to their dispatcher,
Godot, as an emblem of both good and evil. As the nurses exit at an
excruciatingly slow pace, “black night” (36) descends. Shrouded in
darkness, the tramps walk toward the back door adorned with
Botticelli’s painting—the sole bright spot left onstage. As Act One
comes to an end and they march toward spring and light, the lanky tree
starts rotating as if blown by a sudden breath of life. Yet, as the action
proceeds, they will only find more death.
The clinical semantics evoked by the medical emissaries, the aseptic
enclosure, and the schizoid behaviour of its inhabitants enhances the
ominous aura that permeates the performance. Foucault argues that
notions of deviance are defined by governing regimes to discipline and
regulate, rather than castigate, non-conformist behaviour by effecting a
“normalizing judgement” or “normalizing gaze” over the sick, mad, and
criminal (184). Accordingly, the production presents excess and
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