This monograph interrogates the construction of the People's Republic of China across seven plays by White British playwrights. It analyses these original plays to explore the ways in which China is constructed as a political entity in relation to the British sense of self. It constructs a methodological correlation, contingent upon ambivalence, between the appearance of Brechts Berliner Ensemble on the London stage in 1956, the dialectics of Brechts method, interculturalism and translation, and poststructuralist conceptions of language, to explore tensions between neo-imperialist fantasy and postcolonial critique.
Chapter 1: Introduction: Poststructuralism, Dialectics, and the Shadow
of Brecht.
Chapter 2: China is poor because it is unjust. We must prove it,
comrade: the Language of Revolution in David Hares Fanshen (1975).
Chapter
3: China is the mirror in which the West looks for reassurance she is
beautiful: Anders Lustgartens The Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie.-
Chapter 4: The Poetics of Quotation in Howard Brentons #aiww: The Arrest of
Ai Weiwei (2013).
Chapter 5: The Envelope of Empty Speech: Language,
Feeling, Action and Inaction in Howard Barkers In the Depths of Dead Love
(2016).
Chapter 6: Man is not improved by the hurt of others: Sympathetic
Identification in Peter Nicholss Poppy (1982).
Chapter 7: A Dialectics of
Cooperation in Paul Siretts Running the Silk Road (2008).
Chapter 8: A
photograph is a mirror, what we are asked to read is the familiar: The West,
the East, and Lucy Kirkwoods Chimerica (2013).
Ashley Thorpe is Reader in Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London, UK. His previous monograph on Chinese drama, Performing China on the London Stage: Chinese Opera and Global Power, 1759-2008 (Palgrave 2016), explored the effects of transnational and intercultural encounters through an exploration of Chinese performance forms (specifically xiqu) in London. The co-edited volume Contesting British Chinese Culture (Palgrave 2018) included analysis of the impact of Arts Council funding on British Chinese performance, whilst the co-edited Asian City Crossings: Pathways of Performance Through Hong Kong and Singapore (2021) explored transnational theatre ecologies outside of the prevailing East-West dynamic.
