Lady Precious Stream : A Chinese Chinoiserie Anglicized on
the Modern British Stage
Min Tian
Comparative Drama, Volume 51, Number 2, Summer 2017, pp. 158-186 (Article)
Published by Western Michigan University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2017.0015
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/666145
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Lady Precious Stream: A Chinese
Chinoiserie Anglicized on the
Modern British Stage
Min Tian
C
hinoiserie on the British stage had a long history and a time-honored
tradition. Interestingly enough, some of the most notable chinoiserie
performances on the British stage did not originate in Britain but were
imported products. In 1897, at the very beginning of his scathing review
of the performance of two “Chinese” plays, The Cat and the Cherub by
Chester Bailey Fernald at the Lyric Theatre and The First Born by Francis
Powers at the Globe Theatre, George Bernard Shaw attacked what he called
“the Chinatown play” imported from America as “the latest attempt to
escape from hackneydom and cockneydom” on the British stage.1 In “the
Chinatown play,” Shaw continued, the Chinese music was “unmitigated
humbug” and “simply very bad American music,” and the play itself was
“nothing but Wilkie Collins fiction disguised in pigtail and petticoats”
or a dramatic sensation whose “mother” was but “the cheapest and most
conventional of the daughters of art” and whose “father” was “the lowest
and darkest stratum of Americanized yellow civilization.”2 Seeing no
reason that “the Chinatown play”—“a form of art which makes a merit
of crudity”—should not have been manufactured in England, Shaw
volunteered to supply “‘Chinese plays,’ music and all.”3 As Shaw never
produced a “Chinese” play, even after he saw in China an authentic
performance of traditional Chinese theatre, posterity was denied a chance
to see whether the English playwright was capable of manufacturing an
authentic Chinese play instead of reproducing “the Chinatown play,”
American or British. However, Shaw’s sharp critique of the Occidental
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representation of China in those “Chinese” plays or dramatic chinoiserie
was historically grounded and remains relevant to our study of the early
history of the twentieth-century intercultural theatre.
Shaw’s sentiment against the sham Chinatown play was shared by one
of his contemporary British critics, who, having experienced the same
two Chinatown plays, hoped to see a genuine Chinese play: “Undeniably
it would be interesting to import a Chinese play, with actors, scenery,
and stage complete, but it would require to be a genuine product of
the Flowery Land, and, therefore, very different from the two so-called
Chinese plays.”4 But decades into the twentieth century, Shaw and his
like-minded British contemporaries must have been dismayed by the fact
that even more “Chinese” plays on the British stage were imported, yet
none from China: The Yellow Jacket was imported, again, from America
and The Circle of Chalk was imported from Germany. Shaw had nothing
to say about these two “Chinese” plays and no record indicates that he
ever saw any production of them. But Edward Gordon Craig had a short
but pointed response to the sensational success of The Yellow Jacket. He
regarded it as “a nice parody of the Chinese way” and saw no need for
the English to “affect Chinoiserie.”5 He went even further in his position
against any kind of chinoiserie or japonaiserie, Western or Eastern, as
he warned against any Asian artist (Japanese or Chinese) wishing to go
Europe to study and imitate European arts but inevitably ending up only
producing Typhoon, a japonaiserie,6 The Yellow Jacket, or some other
piece “with an Eastern coat on its back, something which is like a penny
peep-show for our stupid grown up children.”7
In a sense, Craig’s argument could have served as a reminder to S.
I. Hsiung (Shih-I Hsiung or Xiong Shiyi, 1905–92) of the intercultural
predicament that he could face as a young Chinese playwright who went to
Britain in 1932 with an aim to study Shakespeare and European theatre.8
Following Shaw’s advice—“Try something different. Something really
Chinese and traditional”9—Hsiung ended up producing Lady Precious
Stream, an English adaptation of a traditional Chinese play and of the art
of traditional Chinese theatre. Much to Shaw’s chagrin, however, Lady
Precious Stream turned out to be, in his words, “a twopenny-halfpenny
melodrama.”10 Perhaps no surprise to Craig, who was no longer interested
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in Asian theatre in the 1930s, Hsiung’s play impressed the young Northrop
Frye, who saw it in London in 1936, as “a very slickly tailored piece of
chinoiserie,” which the future renowned Canadian literary critic, who
had never seen a real Chinese play produced in China, believed was
“ridiculous” to “anyone who had seen a real Chinese play produced under
authentically Chinese conditions.”11 But Craig may have been surprised
that it proved to be an even greater sensation to the London audience than
The Yellow Jacket. From the play’s debut at the Little Theatre in London in
late November 1934 to the end of 1936, altogether there had been nearly
800 performances at the Little Theatre and the Savoy Theatre.12
In the wake of its triumph in London, Hsiung’s play opened on
Broadway at the Booth Theatre in January 1936.13 As late as December
1950, Hsiung’s play was revived at the Arts Theatre in London. A viewer
of the revival observed that “there seems no reason why this pastiche of
the Chinese theatre, which pleased London for several years before the
war, should not ingratiate itself with a new generation of playgoers.”14
Another viewer accounted for the enduring fascination of this dramatic
chinoiserie by comparing it to a Ming dynasty vase: “Like a Ming vase,
this play has an undying fascination. Half the charm lies in telling this
ancient fairy-story according to the quaint conventions of the Chinese
theatre.”15 Decades after he had seen many Chinese traditional dramas
produced in China and had become a distinguished Western authority
on Chinese theatre, A. C. Scott recalled that many years before he had
his first visit to a traditional Chinese theatre in China, he had seen the
performance of Hsiung’s play that had delighted London theatregoers,
including himself, but was soon to realize “what a mere pleasing whimsy
that performance had really been.”16 In the late 1950s, speaking of the
play’s whimsical appeal blending quaint humor with the mimicry of formal
Chinese stage technique by English actors, Scott nevertheless underlined
its lasting impact: “It was a piece of dramatic chinoiserie which struck the
right psychological note and passed into the annals of the London stage
as a ‘longest run.’ Chinese drama became synonymous with Lady Precious
Stream in the minds of thousands and has remained so over the last twenty
years.”17 Decades after its international success in the 1930s, Hsiung’s play
continued to be performed on the global stage in such diverse countries
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as Israel, Kenya, and Ghana as well as China.18 Indeed, as an international
phenomenon in the history of twentieth-century intercultural theatre, the
success of Hsiung’s play was indisputably unrivaled for more than half a
century.
Placed in the historical context of Occidental chinoiserie on the
modern British stage, this essay approaches Hsiung’s play as a selfOrientalized and Anglicized Chinese chinoiserie. It demonstrates that
Lady Precious Stream was at once a validation of the tradition of European
chinoiserie with its idealization of Chinese culture, which was Anglicized
in the English romantic and sentimental traditions, and a validation of
the Eurocentric modernist perspective of Chinese theatrical tradition.
A Chinese Chinoiserie Self-Orientalized
The success of Hsiung’s play as a piece of Chinese chinoiserie was
conditioned, in the first place, by its self-assertion of its Chinese identity
and its self-authorization of its authentic Chineseness and, at the same
time, by a conscious self-Orientalization that (dis)placed itself in the
tradition of European chinoiserie. To have a clear view of the (dis)
placement of Hsiung’s play in the tradition of British chinoiserie theatre,
it is necessary to have a brief review of the British reception of the two
chinoiserie plays mentioned above, The Yellow Jacket and The Circle of
Chalk.
Less than five months after its opening on Broadway on November
4, 1912, The Yellow Jacket, “a Chinese play done in a Chinese manner,”19
written by two Americans, George C. Hazelton and J. H. Benrimo, was
staged at the Duke of York’s on March 27, 1913. According to one British
critic, “All the antique arts of the most gifted Eastern nation, the Chinese,
are now so fully appreciated in Europe that the time has long since been
ripe for us to see a Chinese play produced in the native manner.”20 The
British audience, however, was not ready to accept and appreciate an
authentic Chinese play other than a piece of chinoiserie. For the same
critic, “the actual Chinese theatre contains too much meaningless noise,
an excess of fighting, and too gross an inconsequence to fit in any way
with Western standards”; thus, The Yellow Jacket, this “exotic experiment”
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that made this whole play “elegantly adapted to Western tastes,” was
“much more pleasing to us than would have been a bald transfer of an
original drama.”21 The reviewer for The Observer perhaps provides the
best summary of the “many delightful features” of “Chineseries” (sic) in
The Yellow Jacket: in dress and decoration; of production done with a set
of Chinese conventions, “sometimes very Elizabethan and always very
different from those of our own theatre”; a “little Chinese orchestra” at
the back playing “pleasant little pseudo-Chinese music”; in the play itself
with some of the “Chineseries” (sic) being “very occidental”; and best of
all, the all too visible presence of the property man.22
While acknowledging that The Yellow Jacket was staged “indisputably
‘in the Chinese manner,’” Herbert Farjeon (1887–1945), an influential
British dramatic critic, playwright, and theatre manager, noted that “the
acting or the point of view informing the production” was, more than
anything, “stolidly Occidental” and seemed to mock the production for
its lack of scenery, underlining “the implied absurdity of anything but
realism.”23 In Farjeon’s view, “When the producers do allow the Chinese
methods of production to have their own way undisturbed, the illusion is
far more convincing than any obtained by our own realistic methods.”24
Another critic attacked the idea of The Yellow Jacket as “butchering the
Chinese native drama to make a European holiday”: its persistently
strident musical accompaniment was mercifully softened and its acrobatic
features were almost entirely eliminated. While the costumes and
decorations—evocative of chinoiserie—were kept “magnificently Chinese
to gratify the eye,” the conventions of the Chinese theatre in Chinatown
were strung together to be laughed at.25 The reviewer writing for The Times
of the revival of the play at the Kingsway Theatre noted that it was made
up of “decorative fragments, of which you may detach one or two without
damaging a dramatic fabric.”26 As noted previously, Gordon Craig saw
the British production of The Yellow Jacket as a piece of chinoiserie and
“a nice parody of the Chinese way,” especially its misuse of the property
man, “a sensation to the yokels of London.”27
It is interesting and illuminating to look at some early responses to
the success of The Yellow Jacket by contemporary Chinese critics. Wang
Zhongxian (1888–1937), one of the pioneers of modern Chinese theatre,
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underlined the fakeness of the play’s “Chinese manner” by suggesting that
none of the Chinese would assume that the most important character
in The Yellow Jacket was the property man. He shared a Chinese critic’s
view of the cultural irony in the performance of this early “intercultural”
play: “Had the play been performed by the Chinese, we would certainly
have criticized it as a childish play; it is only because it was performed
by people of the white race that we cannot but praise it as a worthy
drama.”28 Another Chinese critic remarked that because foreigners did
not understand the secret of China’s old theatre, although they intended
to use the “impressionistic” conventions of Chinese theatre—suggestive of
the impressionistic chinoiserie art—The Yellow Jacket became something
that was “neither a donkey nor a horse.”29 Yao Ke (or Yao Hsin-Nung), a
left-leaning playwright and critic, lamented the fact that the significant
impact of Chinese theatre on the Euro-American stage after the First
World War did not stem from an authentic Chinese play but rather from
The Yellow Jacket, “a seemingly plausible but actually fake Chinese play” 30
or “a play neither Chinese nor Western.” 31
In contrast to The Yellow Jacket, The Circle of Chalk, produced by
Basil Dean at the New Theatre in March 1929, appeared more “Chinese”
as it had a definite Chinese source in addition to some Chinese theatrical
conventions. An imported chinoiserie, James Laver’s version was a
straight English translation of Der Kreidekreis (The Chalk Circle, 1925), an
adaptation by the German writer Klabund (Alfred Henschke, 1890–1928),
based on a German version of Stanislas Julien’s 1832 French translation
of The Story of the Chalk Circle (Huilan ji), a thirteenth-century Yuan
drama written by Li Qianfu (or Li Xingdao). But at the same time, more
than The Yellow Jacket, Dean’s thirdhand chinoiserie was an Oriental dish
cooked for Occidental tastes.
James Laver noted that “Klabund was compelled, for Western taste,
to make two important modifications in the original play: he had to tone
down its ruthlessness, and he had to provide what is called ‘love-interest.’”32
E. F. C. Ludowyk’s words best summarize Klabund’s play, likening it to
“that species of Oriental cookery intended solely for Occidental tastes, and
much more satisfying than the real thing”: “Characteristic of Klabund’s
Kreidekreis are three sets of commonplaces: the German intelligentsia’s
stock responses to China; the clichés of contemporary liberal thought;
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and those of Romantic sentiment. In the thick sweet-sour sauce of the
latter float easily distinguishable pieces of chinoiserie, together with
unexceptionable meaty slices of good humanitarian feeling.”33
Citing Shaw’s sentiment against “the Chinatown play,” as noted
previously, Ivor Brown, British writer and dramatic critic, thus remarked
of the Western romanticization of the original Chinese play in The Circle
of Chalk: “The story of the play itself is certainly a pigtail feuilleton made
succulent with the romanticism that is more of Chinatown than of China,”
and it was “well calculated to arouse emotional vibrations in the hearts
of the modern West.”34 To him, the little victim, the heroine, is “a figure
whom one imagines to be more native to Peg’s Paper than to Old Peking,”
and “the amorous Prince is not spiritually a Chinaman at all but a foreign
hero from the romantic bookshelf.”35
Considering the labeling of the play as a “chinoiserie” “a denigration
unworthy of Laver’s sensitive play,” Dean was nevertheless aware of the
difficulty of staging “this fascinating chinoiserie”: “A tea-house and a
judge’s court in mediaeval China, the throne room of the Imperial Palace—
not to mention a Chinese landscape in a snowstorm.”36 Instead of using
the Chinese method of conventional acting and staging without realistic
scenery, Dean chose to go back to the English tradition of “productionism.”
Many British critics noted that the morality, the legend, the simplicity,
and any vitality the play possessed under “an eiderdown of rather oldfashioned chinoiserie”37 were heavily handicapped, weighed down, and
ultimately smothered by Dean’s penchant for overloaded stage effects and
business.38 Another critic simply called Dean’s production a “great chariot
of productionism.”39 All in all, “It is China seen through Mr. Basil Dean
and Mr. Aubrey Hammond’s spy-glass.”40 Thus, for Charles Langbridge
Morgan (1894–1958), an English playwright and critic who once had a
two-year stay in China and “a bowing acquaintance” with Chinese theatre,
Dean’s production was not Chinese and served as “a warning against the
danger of mixing styles and of using what was once a work of art as the
framework of an exhibition conceived in a spirit that appears to be alien
to that of the original.”41
Dean’s production that converted the play into an exhibition of his
“productionism” was mixed with old-fashioned chinoiserie in terms of
the play’s scenic, costume, and music designs. Brown was pleased with
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Aubrey Hammond’s “scenic Chinoiserie” and praised Ernest Irving’s
“musical variants on Chinese Cymbalism” as “extremely delightful.”42
Dean himself acknowledged that Irving’s music was “a pastiche of Chinese
music, suitably Europeanised.”43 Hammond’s design of Chinese costumes
was, however, criticized by James Agate, an influential British critic, for his
“passion for archaeological correctness”: “Had the costumes been worn
inside out they would have been quite as convincing and probably even
more Chinese…. Mr. Hammond would know his Far East sufficiently
for my purpose if he had never been further than Limehouse.”44 Thus,
as Agate suggested, a chinoiserie that suggests “Chineseness” would have
been more “Chinese” than a historically and archeologically authentic
Chinese play and would have been sufficient for the taste of the English
audiences who had become familiar with “the Chinatown play” decried
by Shaw.
Dean himself considered his production of the play a “failure.”45
However, he did not attribute the failure to his “productionism” with
its pursuit of historical accuracy that smothered the fantastic and the
imaginative of the play, making it a lesser chinoiserie than The Yellow Jacket.
He attributed it to his choice of the Chinese-American actress Anna May
Wong, with her American accent, when “any attractive English ingénue
with good voice and gesture might well have carried the production to
success—perhaps for so long a time as Chu Chin Chow.”46 Wong was
faulted by many critics for her Americanized voice. One critic noted that
there was “much more of Anna and May, unfortunately, than of Wong in
the lady’s voice, which imparts an uncomfortable dissonance, a plaintive
monotone of New England preachiness, to the chinoiserie.”47
In spite of Wong’s American accent, Wong must have been imagined
to have the function of supplementing Chinese authenticity to the play’s
chinoiserie by virtue of her Chinese racial identity and her complexion
and physicality. This was the case in spite of the fact that Wong was born
in the United States as a third-generation Chinese-American, that she
had never been to China, and that she had never acted in a Chinatown
theatre.48 For instance, in his cliché-laden Orientalist and sexist rhapsody
over Wong’s “Eastern grace and charm” in her performance that “would
decorate the harem of the Khan of Khans,” Sydney W. Carroll (George
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Frederick Carl Whiteman, 1877–1958), British actor, dramatic critic,
and theatre manager, referred to the Chinese-American actress as “a
true Chinese,” “this little Heathen Chinese,” or “The Wong,” and asserted
the essential “Chineseness” of her performance—“the perfect ensemble
of the delectable Wong,” including particularly “the essentially Chinese
production of her voice.”49 In his judgment, because of Dean’s choice of
Wong, the English producer “has seldom…captured the soul of a country
so firmly, so dexterously as he has in this study of Chinoiserie.”50
In contrast to The Yellow Jacket and The Circle of Chalk that were
“Western imitations,” Lady Precious Stream was a Chinese product.
Indeed, that authentic “Chineseness” was what Hsiung had deliberately
wanted to capitalize on for the success of his play. It was subtitled as
an “old” Chinese play done according to its “traditional” style. Hsiung
strenuously assured his English readers and viewers of the Chinese
authenticity of his adaptation, proclaiming that he had not attempted
in the least to alter anything, that he presented “a typical play exactly as
produced on a Chinese stage,” and that it was “every inch a Chinese play
except the language.”51 Hsiung seemed to have succeeded in brokering
the “Chineseness” of his play with the elite class of his English readers
and viewers. According to W. A. Darlington, a British writer and critic,
Hsiung’s play had “a genuineness” that The Yellow Jacket and The Circle
of Chalk lacked, for it was written in English by a Chinese author.52
Darlington, who knew little about Chinese theatre and culture, saw the
Chinese authorship of the play as an automatic authentication of its
“Chineseness.” Another critic noted that, unlike all other Chinese plays on
the British stage that had been seen through Western eyes, Hsiung’s play
staged at the Little Theatre was “what may be called Chinese Chinese.”53
But Hsiung’s Chinese “Chineseness,” or what Brown called the
“Chinese quaintness,”54 was not seen from the historical perspective of
Chinese theatre but perceived from the Orientalist sensibility of European
chinoiserie. Leslie Rees, dramatic critic for The Era, was not interested in
the relatively bare stage as characteristic of the Chinese staging convention;
he was more delighted by the chinoiserie decoration of the stage—“sidetapestries, a gorgeous blue silk back-cloth and an exquisite procession of
Chinese gowns and drapings.”55 Critics invariably used typical Orientalist
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stock vocabulary to characterize Hsiung’s play: “that delicious piece
of chinoiserie”;56 “The Chinese fantasy”57; “a fairy-story” without “any
qualities more substantial than charm and grace”;58 “a delicate fancy,
a cup of the finest porcelain filled to the brim with the unbelievable.”59
Other critics emphasized its simplicity, naïveté, and purity that provide
“genuine refreshment, and no mere stimulant or narcotic, for Western
nerves.”60
While characteristic of the stock Orientalist idealization of the
Chinese past, J. B. Priestley’s response to Lady Precious Stream also
exemplifies the British elitist and aristocratic imagination of Chinese
history and culture. Priestley, who acknowledged that he had never been
to China, had relished his fantastic Orientalist vision and imagination of
“the Celestial Empire” through “the tiny windows” of chinoiserie—Chinese
paintings, drawings, pottery, and poems. Refusing to accept “an up-todate China on either the American or Russian plan” and bemoaning the
fact that “the fantastic old Empire has gone like smoke,” Priestley found
in Hsiung’s play one of those “tiny windows” that allowed him “so many
enchanting glimpses of remote old China” and of “all the strange charm
of that ancient civilization, with its naïveté and its wisdom, its unique
delicacy and its earthly realism.”61
In spite of their imaginative fascination with the Old Cathay, the
British audiences and critics were in actuality more interested in a
chinoiserie than an authentic ancient Chinese play. In spite of Hsiung’s
claim, his adaptation is far from being an authentic “old” and “traditional”
Chinese play, as he later acknowledged: “From the very beginning I have
never tried to disguise the fact that Lady Precious Stream is a commonplace
melodrama, and it is far from my intention to leave anybody to wonder
at the excellence of classical Chinese drama by comparing it with this
popular commercial drama.”62 Following Lady Precious Stream, Hsiung
translated The Romance of the Western Chamber, a classical Chinese
play, much more “ancient” and “traditional.” Hsiung himself took great
pride in introducing The Western Chamber to his English readers and
audiences as “really an artistic play,” reminding them that it was written in
the thirteenth century by perhaps two of China’s great poets.63 This time
Hsiung did not venture to take liberties with the original text as he did
with Lady Precious Stream. Indeed, in Hsiung’s “authentic” translation,
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the elite class of British writers and critics marveled at “the excellence
of classical Chinese drama.” According to Hsiung, Shaw considered The
Western Chamber far better than Lady Precious Stream, the former being
“a commonplace melodrama” and the latter “a delightful dramatic poem”
like the best English medieval plays.64 Likewise, according to Gordon
Bottomley, poet and playwright who, following W. B. Yeats, had his share
of the early European japonaiserie interest in Japanese classical noh,65 The
Western Chamber was “a faithful reproduction of a highly organized and
subtle play that represents the impressive standards set by the Chinese
theatre at a time when the naïve simplicities of the nun Hroswitha were
symptomatic of the only drama that remained in the Western world.” As
a whole and complete theatre, like that of the ancient Greeks, Chinese
drama “has everything to tell to the British theatre that the British theatre
most needs to learn—or remember.”66
But, to others, Hsiung’s “authentic” translation proved to be pitifully
“a rather stilted piece of work” and much less interesting,67 and its
production done with the conventions of Chinese theatre was no longer
engaging, as there was “plenty of manner but very little matter.”68 Speaking
of the performance of The Western Chamber, Brown noted the appeal of
authentic classical Chinese theatre to the English audiences: “The average
Englishman’s response to the Chinese drama of the thirteenth century may
well be ‘Yes, charming—for forty minutes.’ Mr. Hsiung’s job is to convince
him that the next eighty minutes will not merely repeat the whimsical and
decorative dose.”69 Hsiung failed to bring The Western Chamber to a lasting
success, not only because it merely repeated “the whimsical and decorative
dose” of Chinese theatre, but because it was perhaps too “authentic” as
a Chinese chinoiserie of the thirteenth century, not modernized and
familiarized enough to have a strong and lasting appeal to the sensibility
of modern Western public. In an attempt to underscore the distinction
of Chinese drama from European romantic drama and the superiority of
Chinese civilization that regarded a man of learning highly, as fit to be “a
hero and idol of romance,” Brown may have unintentionally accounted for
the failure of Hsiung’s play. “The hero of this love-story,” Brown reminded
his English viewers, “is none of your dashers and slashers who have gone
spurring and stabbing through romantic drama from the beginnings of
that game.”70
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According to another viewer, the Chinese acting and scenic
conventions as shown in the performance of The Western Chamber ensure
the fluidity and smoothness of narrative and story-telling that cannot be
approached in the West in Shakespearean theatre, even on a revolving
stage, or by the flicker of a cinematograph, for, in Chinese theatre, there is
no scenery to be changed, no existence of “the so-called ‘fourth wall,’” and
therefore no break in dramatic action and illusion. Thus, for the viewer,
the performance of The Western Chamber had “more than a little interest”
for some to reflect on “the nature of dramatic illusion.”71 Such “special
value” as noted by the viewer, however, was lost to average audience
members who, amused by its exotic difference, may have regarded it
as merely “charmingly or entertainingly freakish.”72 Indeed, for all his
appreciation for the Chinese ideas on décor, Sydney Carroll argued that,
as the exception of Lady Precious Stream—“a reaction from expensive
décor”—proved to be nothing but “a delightful departure from custom,”
the Chinese ideas or the “imaginative Chinese principles” cannot be
pursued indefinitely on the British stage and cannot be “indulged” by a
majority of the British playgoers who “unfortunately need to have their
visions made for them,” instead of exercising their own imagination.73
The popular success of Lady Precious Stream may also have been,
ironically, instrumental in depriving the British public of the only chance
to see an authentic performance of traditional Chinese theatre by its
greatest exponent Mei Lanfang. Following his triumph in the Soviet
Union, Mei arrived in London in 1935. According to A. C. Scott, Mei was
anxious to perform there and was even prepared to put up fifty per cent of
the money required. But even with Hsiung’s assistance, no manager was
found ready to take the risk of staging authentic Chinese theatre.74 The
London managers may have been doubtful of the lasting appeal of Mei’s
“classical” performance to the British public and of its potential to rival
the commercial success of Hsiung’s play. But seen from the perspective
of Mei’s Chinese theatre, had Mei performed there for the British public,
it would have been even more ironic, as his performance must have been
perceived in light of traditional European chinoiserie or, more opportunely,
of Hsiung’s Chinese chinoiserie.
Hsiung’s self-Orientalization of Chinese theatre underlying the
overseas success of his play was condemned in China by progressive
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writers and critics. According to Barbara Whittingham-Jones, a British
journalist, by its “very success in popularising antique China” and by
exploiting “the nostalgia for Old Cathay,” Lady Precious Stream did “a
disservice to the new Republic still in the convulsion of revolution”
and Hsiung was attacked by revolutionaries who argued that China’s
patriotic cause would have been better served if Hsiung had introduced
“China’s modern and dynamic revolutionary drama” to Western theatre
instead of staging “antique classics saturated with discarded Confucian
philosophy.”75 Thus, Yao Hsin-Nung called for the exit of Hsiung’s play
for the future of Chinese theatre. In his view, the success of Hsiung’s play
was no proof of “the Peking opera’s fitness for China today” but mere
evidence of “the West being bored by their own hackneyed stagecraft”; it
cannot lead to any doubt of “the disability of the Peking opera to cope with
the life of young China.”76 The most scathing attack on Hsiung’s play was
launched by Hong Shen, one of the influential left-wing playwrights and
critics. Hong Shen accused Hsiung of catering to foreigners’ tastes and of
being sympathetic to their prejudice against everything modern in China,
including modern Chinese drama and cinema and to their predilection
for the Chinese past, including China’s old theatre. In his view, Hsiung’s
play was simply a “falsification” of Chinese theatre and life and, like
those treasured Chinese antiques seen on the Exhibition of Chinese Art
at Burlington House in 1935, could do nothing good for China because
it failed to draw English viewers’ attention to the determination of the
Chinese people struggling to liberate and save their nation from foreign
enemies. Thus Hong dismissed Hsiung’s play—and his dishonest efforts
to get rich—as an insult to the Chinese nation.77
In his response to Hong Shen’s criticism, insisting on the value of
traditional Chinese culture to be recognized, Hsiung contended that he
did not overlook or look down upon new and modern Chinese culture
and denied that his play was an insult to the Chinese nation.78 As a
demonstration of his interest in modern Chinese history and culture,
Hsiung wrote The Professor from Peking five years after the publication
of Lady Precious Stream. He emphasized that in writing this modern
Chinese play, he aimed to give the public in the West “a glimpse” of
China’s “modern drama and modern life” and to correct and dispel
those Western misconceptions of China.79 Yet, it failed to capture the
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imagination of English audiences and critics, who, having been charmed
by European chinoiserie and, in particular, by Hsiung’s Chinese chinoiserie,
did not appreciate such a modern Chinese play. Lord Dunsany (Edward
Plunkett, 1878–1957), an Irish writer and dramatist of fantasy and exotica,
deplored the fact that in The Professor from Peking, “the land of Lady
Precious Stream”—“this land of dragons, peach-trees, peonies, and plumblossoms, with its ages and ages of culture, slowly storing its dreams in
green jade, porcelain, and gold”—“is complicated by telephones, bombs,
and Communism” as a result of its getting to know, “unfortunately,” too
much of the West.80 The production of the play at the Malvern Festival
was seen as a damning proof that modern Chinese drama “has little of
the grace but all the leisureliness that belonged to the old,” even though
“the profusion of authentic local colour is meant to correct the average
European’s mistaken conception of the Chinese as a race of Mr. Wu’s.”81
Similarly, while acknowledging that “nothing could be more laudable”
than Hsiung’s pronounced intention to present “the modern Chinese
as he really is, and not as the English stage has hitherto conceived him,”
James Agate contended that “what Mr. Hsiung has failed to ask himself is
whether he knows English audiences sufficiently to make his authenticities
amusing.”82 Alan Dent, a Scottish critic and apprentice to Agate, simply
called Hsiung’s play “the oddest sort of Sino-Victorian melodrama.”83
A Chinese Chinoiserie Anglicized
Lady Precious Stream distinguished itself as a Chinese chinoiserie but,
at the same time, it familiarized and fascinated the English viewers as a
self-Orientalized and Anglicized Chinese chinoiserie. Hsiung’s modern
adaptation served to validate the tradition of European chinoiserie that
idealizes Chinese civilization and was internalized and domesticated by
the English romantic and sentimental traditions.
Hsiung’s approach to the original Chinese play participates in
Klabund’s romantic treatment of traditional Chinese drama, as noted
previously. Likewise, Hsiung modernized and romanticized the old
Chinese play. Hsiung replaced many profanities in the original play with
new jokes and humor and eliminated its portrayal of cruelties:84 The
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original heroine Wang Baochuan turns into a sixteen-year-old feminist
who wants to choose her own husband;85 Hsieh Ping-Kuei is ordered
by Precious Stream to kneel down to his mother-in-law to show that he
“hold[s] the female sex in higher esteem”;86 and polygamy is replaced
by modern romance. According to one critic, the performance by the
English actors did not affect the English viewers as “even approximately
Chinese,” and yet they were charmed throughout by “its oddity, its fairytale sentimentality, and its pantomimic humours.”87 As noted previously,
because of these changes Hsiung was accused by his contemporary
Chinese critics of distorting ancient Chinese life and culture in his efforts
to cater to the tastes of Western audiences.
The beginning of the play, showing Prime Minister Wang Yun
celebrating New Year’s Day and having a family feast in the garden to
enjoy the snow, was entirely Hsiung’s own invention.88 Paradoxically it
was Hsiung’s modern invention that stimulated Lascelles Abercrombie’s
fantastic imagination of “the secret” of the ancient Chinese way of life. For
Abercrombie, a noted British poet and literary critic who once regarded
the Greeks and the Chinese as “the two most profoundly artistic peoples
in history,”89 the real force of Hsiung’s “Chinese magic” does not lie in
the imaginative techniques of Chinese theatre but in its revelation of
“the secret” of life that Westerners did not have but that was enjoyed
by the enchanted and charming people of Hsiung’s nation.90 After all,
regardless of the play’s original Chinese authenticity, what really mattered
was Abercrombie’s sentimental nostalgic desire for the European past
that slumbered in his depths and that struck a chord with his Orientalist
idealization and romanticization of the Chinese past.
Similarly, Brown contended that rather than its theatrical conventions,
the real pleasures of Chinese theatre rest in the “simplicity of emotion”
and in the charming story of the play: “the eternal story of elementary
romance,” a romance of “patience without a monument” to the faithful
heroine who, “constant as Penelope,” has been living in poverty in a cave
for eighteen years waiting for her husband’s return.91 For another viewer,
with its “pellucid simplicity and romantic pathos,” this “fragile Cinderellalike story,” like “a fragrant cup of China tea,” is “worthy of Jane Austen, the
lessons of patience rewarded and loyalty estimated at its true worth.”92
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According to Hsiung, during the time he was writing his play, he
saw every play staged in London, no matter whether it was a success
or a failure, and paid particular attention to the audiences’ responses to
the performances. He acknowledged that the audiences of the London
theatres were the teachers from whom he benefitted most.93 With such
firsthand experience, Hsiung managed to make his adaptation appeal
to both the highbrows and the lowbrows of London audiences.94 Lin
Yutang, one of Hsiung’s contemporary Chinese writers, accounted for
the success of Hsiung’s play by “the most singular characteristic” of his
English translation: “its apt and happy manner of making things clear to
an English audience,” which makes the tone of his characters—the Prime
Minister and his family talking about the disgrace of having their daughter
married to a gardener—“so typically English” that one might believe it to
be any one of the English lords and ladies protesting against the marriage
of his or her daughter to a commoner.95
One of Hsiung’s contemporary Chinese critics, Wen Yuan-ning, a
British-trained professor of English literature, emphasized James Barrie’s
influence on Hsiung’s play. Years before he landed in Britain, Hsiung had
developed a deep interest in Barrie’s work and had translated a number
of his plays, including The Admirable Crichton and Peter Pan. In Wen’s
view, “No doubt, in translating Barrie’s plays into Chinese, Mr. Hsiung
has soaked himself through and through with the idioms and turns of
that dramatist,” and Hsiung showed himself very much, “even in the very
choice of subject for translation,” to be “a disciple” of Barrie. Like Barrie’s
Dear Brutus and The Admirable Crichton, Wen continued, Lady Precious
Stream is “the creation of Fancy, not of Imagination…. It produces no stir
in the depths, there is only a ripple on the surface,—a ripple of laughter,
and of tears.”96
American critic George Jean Nathan described Barrie’s dramatic
“trick” as “a statement of the sentimental in terms of the mildly cynical,”
characterized by all those “much lauded Barrie qualities” that appear
in his plays: “the old ‘charm,’ ‘wistfulness,’ ‘eerie fancy,’ and ‘delicate
imagination.’”97 Arguing that Barrie “has kept the balance between
cynicism and sentimentalism,” J. B. Priestley, also known for his fair share
of sentimentalism in his novels and plays (visible, more or less, in his
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174
fantastic Orientalist imagination of the Chinese past discussed previously),
likewise noted that “all the familiar Barrie traits, humor, pathos, elfin
charm” are “fully displayed” in his plays.98 All these “Barrie qualities” or
“Barrie traits” can also be used, and were in fact used by British critics,
to describe Hsiung’s play.
As noted previously, both Shaw and Hsiung saw Lady Precious Stream
as a piece of commonplace melodrama. James Agate had a good summary
of the attributes of “the saving grace” of a good melodrama: it makes “a
whole-hearted appeal” to the whole gallery of audiences with different
tastes and it reiterates in and out of season what popular audiences most
wish to hear.99 According to Agate, the success of melodrama depends
on two prime conditions: the first is that “it shall deal simply with simple
things”; the second is that “it shall have comic as well as serious attributes,
and deal broadly in the stuff of simple humour.”100 In contrast to tragedy
that moves through pity and terror, Agate observed, “melodrama functions
through pity and fun.”101
A chinoiserie play has all the main attributes of melodrama: use
of stock characters (suffering heroine duly rewarded and villain duly
punished in the end, buffoons providing comic relief with humors and
clowning); dramatic situations with suspension and amazement; happy
ending; a good dose of morality; and, to crown it all, the exoticism of
chinoiserie that adds to the overall dramatic effect and to the imagination of
the audiences. Like its two chinoiserie predecessors, Lady Precious Stream
has all the hallmarks characteristic of a piece of English melodrama with
added flavors of a Chinese chinoiserie. Critics described The Yellow Jacket
as “the curious medley of melodrama, farce, pantomime, and Miracle
Play,”102 or as “an exalted and fanciful fairy story, full of paradisiacal
impossibilities, light sententiousness, snow-flake sorrows, and marvelous
perils.”103 The Circle of Chalk was viewed as “a good melodrama with a
happy ending in a Chinese setting.”104 A reviewer for The Sunday Times
noted the “unmistakable” similarity of Lady Precious Stream to some of
the English “simpler melodramas.”105 Punch offered a parody of the play’s
Chinese theatrical conventions by applying them to the English crime
plays.106 In the view of one contemporary Chinese critic, Hsiung’s claim for
the Chinese authenticity of his play was “a strategy of attracting his readers
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Comparative Drama
and audiences,” and, with all the changes Hsiung made, Lady Precious
Stream was not much different from popular English melodrama with
clear-cut character portrayal, fantastic plot, and moving happy ending.107
The fusion in Hsiung’s play of Chinese chinoiserie with English
romantic, sentimental, and melodramatic elements fueled its commercial
success. Before the production of Hsiung’s play, Nancy Price had eloquently
argued for theatre’s need and privilege to foster the best art and against
theatre managers’ desire for commercial gain at the expense of art.108 But
the play was written and produced with the author’s and producer’s keen
awareness of its economic benefits. Hsiung later acknowledged that he
wrote this “commonplace melodrama” or “popular commercial drama”109
for “a solely commercial reason.”110 Price reported that the performances
by the People’s National Theatre in the season of 1934 were all significant
financial failures, with the sole exception of Hsiung’s “wonderfully
refreshing” play that made a profit of more than £537 for the company.111
The great commercial success of Hsiung’s play serves a reminder of what
Shaw had attacked as “commercial speculations” of those “sham Chinese
plays”112 and of what Craig had warned artists from “the ancient East”
against imitating in the West—the “‘fresh spirit’…of Commercialism,”
which, for Craig, would inevitably lead to the death of their ancient art.113
A Chinese Chinoiserie Modernized
In Lady Precious Stream, as in such similar chinoiserie plays as The
Yellow Jacket and The Circle of Chalk, the visually stylized decorative use
of Chinese theatrical conventions was evocative of the impressionistic
and non-naturalistic chinoiserie art. Not a “naturalistic” or historical
representation, it had no substance of the spirit of Chinese theatre but
simulated its “Chineseness” and appealed to the anti-naturalist imagination
of traditional Chinese or “Oriental” theatre by the European avant-garde.
For instance, as early as 1907, V. E. Meyerhold wrote of the importance
of decorative design as opposed to scenic naturalism, citing Japanese
theatre: “But just as the theatre must not revert to naturalism, equally it
must not become merely ‘decorative’ (unless the word be interpreted in
the same sense as in the Japanese theatre).”114 A few years later, Meyerhold
defined what he called the “decorative task” from the perspective of his
anti-naturalist and anti-psychological theatre of the grotesque:
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176
The grotesque aims to subordinate psychologism to a decorative task. That
is why in every theatre which has been dominated by the grotesque the
aspect of design in its widest sense has been so important (for example, the
Japanese theatre). Not only the settings, the architecture of the stage, and
the theatre itself are decorative, but also the mime, movements, gestures
and poses of the actors.115
But, in contrast to the surface decoration of Chinese theatrical and
performance conventions in Hsiung’s play, Meyerhold’s use of theatrical
chinoiserie and japonaiserie was welded into his modernist ideas and
practices. Hence the difference: Hsiung’s play was a Chinese chinoiserie
decorated with a simulation of the method of traditional Chinese staging
and acting transposed (displaced) as symptomatic of European modernity;
Meyerhold’s theatre was a fundamentally European modernist art welded
with the displaced decorative style of chinoiserie and japonaiserie.
The European (British) perception of the modernity of Hsiung’s
play was in line with its view of The Yellow Jacket and was influenced
by the imported American chinoiserie. Critics noted that The Yellow
Jacket appealed to the imagination of the audiences and proved to be
“a salutary corrective” to stage realism.116 For St. John Ervine, British
playwright and critic, the play divided the audiences into two classes: “the
imaginative” and “the unimaginative.”117 J. T. Grein, British impresario
and dramatic critic, also underlined the appeal of Chinese theatre to
the “imaginative powers” of the audiences and the modern advantage
of its imaginative scenic simplicity over the laborious European scenic
naturalism: “Curiously enough, the Chinese setting of two chairs with a
piece of brocaded red silk carelessly draped over them is a more fanciful
love-boat than, for instance, the laborious Venetian scenery which in
the barcarolle of the ‘Contes d’Hoffmann’ we saw at Hammerstein’s.”118
The modernity of Chinese theatre was suggested in a statement made by
Grein years later that “one of the most remarkable developments of the
modern theatre is the progress in the economy of scenery”: the tendency
is to make the scenery subservient to imagination; the audience is taught
to exercise their sense of the imaginative.119
Another viewer was even more enthusiastic over “the Eastern view”
shown in The Yellow Jacket that attached first importance to the power of
imagination and suggestion in contrast to the “unimaginative” belief of
English audiences in “imitation [of] life and nature” and in the “realism”
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Comparative Drama
of the stock scenery, properties, and spectacles on the British stage.120
The viewer found in the property man “a new dramatic power” that rises
“to the sublimity of Æschylean tragedy” and that has “a dramatic effect
that [August] Strindberg aimed at in his mystic plays”—“this duality
of the visible with the invisible” successfully revealed by “this Chinese
method.”121 The same viewer was convinced of the significant impact of
the production of this Chinese play on modern European theatre: “If only
as a lesson in presentation, it teaches how infinitely behind the East we
are in the mechanism of stage optics, how far more subtle, poignant, and
emotional is the Oriental method of appealing to the imagination through
the imagination, what curious and transcendental effects are obtainable
through the poetic medium of suggestion.”122
In line with the tradition of Occidental theatrical chinoiserie
established by The Yellow Jacket, Hsiung self-Orientalized his play by
essentializing the non-realistic features of traditional Chinese theatre
and by disregarding the fact that, as a result of the reform that had
taken place in Chinese theatre in the first decades of the twentieth
century, traditional Chinese plays were also staged with realistic scenery
and without the use of the property man. According to Hsiung, “The
conventional Chinese stage is not at all realistic. Apart from its lack
of scenery, the indispensable property man is the greatest obstacle to
realism.”123 Hsiung’s interpretation—and his play as an example—served
to validate the European modernist interpretation of traditional Chinese
theatre, inspired by the international success of The Yellow Jacket.
Likewise, English theatre artists and critics found the imaginative
method of Lady Precious Stream superior to Western realism. According
to one critic, like great dramatists such as Euripides, Shakespeare, and
Eugene O’Neill, Hsiung had a perfect understanding of dramatic art that
values the ability of the actor and the imagination of the audience over
realistic scenery and properties.124 Gordon Bottomley found Hsiung’s play
more satisfying than Western realism as a delightful fusion of Chinese
chinoiserie and modernity: “We have never held the gorgeous East in fee
more inexpensively or convincingly before, while discerning audiences,
in an ecstasy of enjoyment, have learnt from it that many of the essentials
of our twentieth-century dramatic method are inessential.”125 Charles
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178
Morgan asserted the superiority of “the Chinese dramatic formalism”—in
particular, the character’s direct audience-address that avoids “the mesh
of modern psychology” —over the naturalist manner of Western drama
that is designed to preserve naturalistic illusion and at all costs to prevent
actors from direct communication with their audiences.126 For Brooks
Atkinson, who had had “a glimpse of the pure art of Chinese acting” in
Mei Lanfang’s performance a few years before he saw Hsiung’s play in New
York, the English actors performed the leading roles with “an enchanting
appreciation of the lacquered, ceremonious style of Chinese acting.”127
Atkinson’s observation, like Meyerhold’s idea of the important place of
the decorative in both scenic and acting design that he perceived was
exemplified by Japanese theatre, underlines the (dis)placement of the
decorative style of chinoiserie in the modernist perception of the antinaturalist style of Chinese acting.
In the performance of Hsiung’s Chinese chinoiserie by the English
actors who imitated the style of Chinese acting, Chinese acting
conventions and techniques became, to use Meyerhold’s words, “merely
‘decorative’” and thereby exotic and quaint, not organically integrated
and embodied in the movements and gestures of the actors as they were
in an authentic performance by a professional Chinese actor. Thus, the
decorative in Chinese acting was displaced in the English performance of
Hsiung’s play and doubly in the modernist perception of its modernity. The
perception of modernity in the decorative was naturally more pronounced
in the staging of Hsiung’s play in terms of scenic design or, paradoxically,
in terms of the very absence of scenery. Here the decorative or the absence
of naturalistic scenery was perceived as a form of modernist design that
appealed to the imagination of the audiences. J. T. Grein cautioned that
the English viewers should not look in it for “elaborate scenic devices and
all the mechanical resources” of the well-equipped European stage but
for the Chinese wisdom to appreciate the power of imagination.128 W. A.
Darlington noted that in the play “make-believe ranks before realism.”129
For Sydney Carroll, Hsiung “defies realism” and in his play “the very
absence of décor…proves in itself a form of décor.”130 James Agate put it
simply: in one respect, Hsiung’s play—“the little Chinese fantasy”—“towers
over everything else on the London stage at the moment. It doesn’t need
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179
any scenery.”131 In a lecture delivered before the University of Cambridge
in 1936, arguing that “these so-called ultra-modern productions” that
dispensed with scenery and relied on the audience’s imagination “is in
reality the oldest form of presentation,” Sir Cedric Hardwicke, a noted
English actor, cited the revival of Lady Precious Stream as an instance
demonstrating that the theatre of the future will move in the direction
of simplicity that “is bound to ensure the continuance of the theatre,
regardless of the trend of science and invention.”132
Conclusion
In contrast to historical Euro-American artistic chinoiserie, an Occidental
decorative representation of Chinese culture and civilization through
its artifacts and art objects, and to historical Euro-American theatrical
chinoiserie, a stylized performance of Chinese theatre and cultural
traditions, Lady Precious Stream as a Chinese chinoiserie at once
differentiated and familiarized itself by a self-authorized positioning/
placement, and a self-Orientalized translation/displacement, of its
“Chineseness,” which thereby served to legitimate the tradition of
Occidental chinoiserie. Furthermore, as a Chinese chinoiserie, its success
was augmented by its Anglicization, in which Hsiung’s Chinese chinoiserie
that participates in the tradition of European chinoiserie in its idealization
of Chinese civilization was internalized and domesticated by the English
romantic and sentimental traditions.
As a Chinese theatrical chinoiserie, the modernity of Hsiung’s
play was not constructed on Occidental realism that Hsiung’s Chinese
contemporaries imitated and practiced for modern Chinese theatre and
for the modernization of traditional Chinese theatre. It was constructed
on Hsiung’s self-Orientalization and essentialization of the non-realistic
features of traditional Chinese theatre, which served to validate and
valorize the European modernist interpretation of traditional Chinese
theatre. Consequently, the modernity of Hsiung’s play was perceived in
the West from the perspective of modern Western anti-realist avant-garde
theatre: a displacement of Chinese theatrical tradition in an Anglicized
Chinese chinoiserie.
University of Iowa
Min Tian
180
notes
1 George Bernard Shaw, “Chin Chon Chino,” The Saturday Review 84 (November 6, 1897):
488–90 (488).
2 Ibid., 488–89. A “candid playgoer” also noted “the extraordinary ‘Chinese’ music” in the
production of The First Born. Dick, “Letters of a Candid Playgoer,” To-day 17, no. 209 (November
6, 1897): 23. Given Shaw’s disdain of the fakeness of American Chinatown plays, it is interesting to
note his first direct experience of a traditional Chinese theatre performance during his 1933 visit
to China. According to S. I. Hsiung, in their first meeting upon Shaw’s return to Britain, Hsiung
was anxious to know what impressed Shaw most in a traditional theatre house Shaw had visited in
Peking (Beijing). Having been looking forward to hearing from Shaw “some sharp attack” on the
Chinese “theatrical custom,” Hsiung was, however, “staggered” by Shaw’s answer that “the most
impressive sight in a Chinese theatre was nothing on the stage done by the players, but the throwing
and the catching of bundles and hot towels deftly performed from great distances in the auditorium
by the ushers,” and he could only conclude that Shaw “must have been sitting most of the time with
his back to the stage.” See S. I. Hsiung, “Through Eastern Eyes,” in G.B.S 90: Aspects of Bernard
Shaw’s Life and Work, ed. S. Winsten (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1946), 198. However,
in a letter to English composer Edward Elgar, dated May 30, 1933, Shaw spoke sympathetically
of the function of percussion music in the Chinese “operatic” theatre: “The Chinese will reveal to
you the whole secret of opera, which is, not to set a libretto to music, but to stimulate actors to
act and declaim. When there is a speech to be delivered, the first (and only) fiddler fiddles at the
speaker as if he were lifting a horse over the Grand National jumps; an ear splitting gong clangs at
him; a maddening castanet clacks at him; and finally the audience joins in and incites the fiddler
to redouble his efforts. You at once perceive that this is the true function of the orchestra in the
theatre and that the Wagnerian score is only gas and gaiters.” See Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters,
1926–1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1988), 4: 341.
3 Shaw, “Chin Chon Chino,” 488.
4 J. F. N., “Drama,” The Academy 52, no. 1331 (November 6, 1897): 380–81 (380).
5 Edward Gordon Craig, review of The Chinese Theatre, by Tchov-kia-kien, The Mask 9 (1923): 33.
6 Typhoon is an English version (by Laurence Irving) of a dramatic japonaiserie by a Hungarian
playwright, Melchior Lengyel. For a review of the English production of Typhoon at the Haymarket
Theatre in London, see The Times, April 3, 1913, 6.
7 Edward Gordon Craig, “Japanese Artists in the West,” The Mask 6, no. 1 (July 1913): 89–91
(90–91).
8 For an account of Hsiung’s life, see Diana Yeh, The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and
the Struggle for Modernity (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014).
9 Times of Malaya, June 24, 1935, quoted in Diana Yeh, The Happy Hsiungs, 34.
10 S. I. Hsiung, “Afterthought,” in The Professor from Peking (London: Methuen, 1939), 174.
11 The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp 1932–1939, vol. 2, ed. Robert D.
Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 568. The editor misidentifies the heroine’s
original name (Wang Pao-Chuan) as the name of the author of the play (569).
12 George W. Bishop, “Plays & Players,” The Sunday Times, November 22, 1936, 6; The Times,
November 25, 1936, 12.
13 See James Harbeck, “The Quaintness—and Usefulness—of the Old Chinese Traditions:
The Yellow Jacket and Lady Precious Stream,” Asian Theatre Journal 13 (1996): 238–47 (242–45).
14 “Arts Theatre: ‘Lady Precious Stream,’” The Times, December 14, 1950, 8.
Comparative Drama
181
15 “The Arts: ‘Lady Precious Stream,’” The Stage, December 21, 1950.
16 A. C. Scott, Actors are Madmen: Notebook of a Theatregoer in China (Madison: The University
of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 46, 48.
17 A. C. Scott, Mei Lan-fang: The Life and Times of a Peking Actor (1959; Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 1971), 119.
18 See Yeh, The Happy Hsiungs, 145–51.
19 See George C. Hazelton and J. H. Benrimo, The Yellow Jacket: A Chinese Play Done in a
Chinese Manner (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill, 1913).
20 “‘The Yellow Jacket’ at the Duke of York’s Theatre,” The Academy and Literature 84, no. 2135
(April 5, 1913): 434–35 (434).
21 Ibid.
22 “Duke of York’s ‘The Yellow Jacket,’” The Observer, March 30, 1913, 9.
23 Herbert Farjeon, “Two Premieres Summarised,” The World, April 1, 1913, 464.
24 Ibid.
25 P. C., “A Chinese Play at the Duke of York’s Theatre,” The Manchester Guardian, March
28, 1913, 10.
26 “The Yellow Jacket,” The Times, March 8, 1922, 10.
27 Craig, review of The Chinese Theatre, 33.
28 Wang Zhongxian, “Xiyang de juchang yiwen: Xiyang ren yan de Zhongguo jiuxi” (Theatrical
anecdotes in the West: old Chinese drama performed by Westerners), Xiju (Drama) 1, no. 4 (1921):
3–5. All translations of Chinese sources are mine.
29 Xi Bei, “Gai tou le Zhongguo xi de Meiguo ren” (Americans who thoroughly altered Chinese
drama), San liu jiu huabao (369 Pictorial) 12, no. 9 (1941): 12.
30 Yao Ke, “Xian tan Huang magua” (Small talk on The Yellow Jacket), Xiao juchang (Little
Theatre), no. 1 (1940): 12–13 (12).
31 Yao Ke, “Xian tan Huang magua,” Xiao juchang (Little Theatre), no. 2 (1940): 17–20 (17).
32 James Laver, “Introduction,” in Klabund, The Circle of Chalk, trans. James Laver (London:
William Heinemann, 1929), xi.
33 E. F. C. Ludowyk, “The Chalk Circle: A Legend in Four Cultures,” Comparative Literature:
Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association 1 (1960):
249–56 (253).
34 Ivor Brown, “Chin Chon Chino,” The Saturday Review, March 23, 1929, 390–91 (390).
35 Ibid., 390–91. Peg’s Paper was a women’s magazine of romance fiction published in London
during the first half of the twentieth century.
36 Basil Dean, Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography 1927–1972 (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 65.
37 Omicron, “Plays and Pictures,” The Nation and Athenaeum XLIV (March 23, 1929): 880–81
(881).
38 Charles Morgan, “Anna May Wong in a London Play,” The New York Times, March 31, 1929,
sec. 8, 2; G. W. B., “The Circle of Chalk,” The Era, March 20, 1929, 1.
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182
39 “The Circle of Chalk,” The Times, March 15, 1929, 14. See also “The Playhouses,” The
Illustrated London News, March 30, 1929, d; L. B., “‘The Circle of Chalk’: Chinese Play at the New
Theatre,” The Manchester Guardian, March 15, 1929, 8.
40 G. W. B., “The Circle of Chalk,” The Era, March 20, 1929, 1.
41 Morgan, “Anna May Wong in a London Play.”
42 Ivor Brown, “The Circle of Chalk,” The Observer, March 17, 1929, 15.
43 Dean, Mind’s Eye, 66.
44 James Agate, “Too Much of Water,” The Sunday Times, March 17, 1929, 6.
45 Dean, Mind’s Eye, 69.
46 Ibid., 67–68. Chu Chin Chow (1916), an Orientalist musical comedy by British actor and
director Oscar Asche, was the most popular and successful musical on the British stage during
World War I.
47 Richard Jennings, “The Theatre,” The Spectator, March 23, 1929, 458. See also “Plays of the
Month,” Play Pictorial 54, no. 325 (April 1929): 7–11 (10); “The Playhouses,” The Illustrated London
News, March 30, 1929, d; “London’s Newest Actress: Chinese Girl with a Broadway Voice,” Daily
Express, March 15, 1929, 1; G. W. B., “The Circle of Chalk,” 1.
48 “Anna May Wong. A Chinese Actress in Film and Play,” The Observer, February 24, 1929, 11.
49 Sydney W. Carroll, “A Star of Film and Drama. Anna May Wong. Beauty and Talent,” The
Daily Telegraph, March 21, 1929, 19.
50 Ibid.
51 S. I. Hsiung, “Introduction,” in Lady Precious Stream: An Old Chinese Play Done into English
According to Its Traditional Style (London: Methuen, 1934), xvii. See also S. I. Hsiung, “The Stage in
China. The Kindly Property Man. Cups of Tea for the Actors,” The Observer, December 9, 1934, 10.
Hsiung’s article was later reprinted as “Some Conventions of the Chinese Stage,” People’s National
Theatre Magazine 1, no. 13 (December 1934): 3–5.
52 W. A. Darlington, “Chinese Author’s English Play: Charming Romance at the Little,” The
Daily Telegraph, November 29, 1934, 10. Sydney W. Carroll also noted “the benefit of direct Chinese
supervision” Hsiung provided over the English players. Sydney W. Carroll, “Chinese Ideas on Décor:
‘Lady Precious Stream,’” The Daily Telegraph, December 6, 1934, 6.
53 “Lady Precious Stream,” The Stage (London), December 6, 1934, 12.
54 Ivor Brown, “The World of the Theatre,” The Illustrated London News, November 23, 1935, 934.
55 Leslie Rees, “‘Lady Precious Stream’ at the Little,” The Era, December 5, 1934, 12.
56 E. L., “Plays & Players,” The Sunday Times, August 4, 1935, 4.
57 “Lady Precious Stream,” The Times, November 25, 1936, 12; George W. Bishop, “Plays &
Players,” The Sunday Times, November 22, 1936, 6.
58 Derek Verschoyle, “The Theatre,” The Spectator, December 7, 1934, 876.
59 “Lady Precious Stream,” Play Pictorial 66, no. 394 (February 1935): 3–7 (3).
60 “A Chinese Romance,” The New Statesman and Nation, January 19, 1935, 75.
61 J. B. Priestley, “Preface,” in S. I. Hsiung, The Story of Lady Precious Stream (London:
Hutchinson, 1950), 7–8.
Comparative Drama
183
62 Hsiung, “Afterthought,” 177.
63 S. I. Hsiung, “Translator’s Introduction” (1935), in The Romance of the Western Chamber,
trans. S. I. Hsiung (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), xxxviii.
64 Bernard Shaw, quoted in Hsiung, “Afterthought,” 177.
65 Bottomley acknowledged that he “had been among the first experimenters with Yeats’s
development of the Nō form, having been interested in the possibilities of the Japanese original for
many previous years.” Gordon Bottomley, A Stage for Poetry: My Purposes with My Plays (Kendal,
England: Titus Wilson & Son, 1948), 21.
66 Gordon Bottomley, “Preface,” in The Romance of the Western Chamber, trans. S. I. Hsiung
(New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1936), ix.
67 J. O’G. Anderson, “Chinese Books,” Life and Letters Today 13, no. 2 (December 1935): 203.
68 R. C., “The Western Chamber,” The Sunday Times, January 22, 1939, 6.
69 Ivor Brown, “The Week’s Theatres: ‘The Western Chamber,’” The Observer, December 11,
1938, 13.
70 Ibid.
71 “New Theatre: ‘The Western Chamber,’” The Times, January 21, 1939, 10.
72 Ibid.
73 Sydney W. Carroll, “Chinese ideas on décor,” 6.
74 Scott, Mei Lan-fang, 119.
75 Barbara Whittingham-Jones, China Fights in Britain: A Factual Survey of a Fascinating
Colony in Our Midst (London: W. H. Allen, 1944), 48.
76 Yao Hsin-Nung, “Exit Lady Precious Stream,” The China Critic 11, no. 11 (December 12,
1935): 249–52 (250).
77 Hong Shen, “Ru guo de Wang Baochuan” (Wang Baochuan, an insult to the nation), Guang
ming (Glory) 1, no. 3 (1936): 166–71.
78 Fen, “Yu Xiong Shiyi tan Wang Baochuan” (A conversation with Xiong Shiyi about Wang
Baochuan), Tianjin Yi shi bao (Tianjin Social Welfare), January 7, 1937, sec. 4, 14; Jian Zi, “Xiong
Shiyi zai Nanjing” (Xiong Shiyi in Nanjing), Hanxue zhoukan (Sweat and blood weekly) 8, no. 4
(1937): 74–75.
79 Hsiung, “Afterthought,” 184.
80 Lord Dunsany, “Preface,” in The Professor from Peking (London: Methuen, 1939), viii. A
few years earlier, Dunsany had fancied, from his experience of the 1935 Chinese art exhibition at
Burlington House, that the Chinese people of long ago were the “travelers” of the worlds of both
nature and fairyland and that “one of the secrets of those people’s knowledge was perhaps not having
a gun,” a knowledge of calm and serenity the Europeans “will hardly attain until they have lost their
machinery.” Lord Dunsany, “People of Long Ago,” The Morning Post (London), December 10, 1935, 10.
81 “Malvern Festival: ‘The Professor from Peking,’” The Times, August 9, 1939, 10. Here the
reviewer refers to the title character of the play, Mr. Wu, by Harry M. Vernon and Harold Owen.
The staging of the play in the West End of London in November 1913 and its subsequent revivals
popularized the character as a stereotyped racist portrayal of the Chinese in the British popular
imagination.
Min Tian
184
82 James Agate, “The Malvern Festival: Five-Sixths of a Disappointment,” The Sunday Times,
August 13, 1939, 4.
83 Alan Dent, “The Theatre,” The Spectator, August 11, 1939, 217.
84 In the original, the hero Xue Pinggui says he wants to cut his wife Wang Baochuan in
half if he finds her unfaithful to him; Wei Hu (or Wei the Tiger General) is spared a violent death
(beheading) at the end of Hsiung’s adaptation.
85 J. M. Bulloch, “Chinese Gem in an English Setting: ‘Lady Precious Stream,’” The Sunday
Times, July 15, 1934, 10.
86 Hsiung, Lady Precious Stream, 47.
87 Carroll, “Chinese Ideas on Décor,” 6.
88 Hsiung’s invention is obviously different from the original dramatic episode, Cailou pei
(Marriage on the Painted Tower, part of the original play, Hong zong lie ma [The Red Mane Stallion]),
which was adapted into Hsiung’s play. As early as 1901, Herbert A. Giles had published an English
translation of an acting edition of the episode, titled “The Flowery Ball.” See Herbert A. Giles, A
History of Chinese Literature (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901), 264–68.
89 Lascelles Abercrombie, The Theory of Poetry (London: Martin Secker, 1924), 46.
90 Lascelles Abercrombie, “Preface,” in S. I. Hsiung, Lady Precious Stream (London: Methuen,
1934), viii.
91 Ivor Brown, “Lady Precious Stream,” The Observer, January 13, 1935, 13.
92 “Lady Precious Stream,” The Stage, December 14, 1939, 10.
93 Xiong Shiyi, “Bashi huiyi: chu guo dujin qu, xian Wang Baochuan” (Memoirs at eighty:
to become gilded, going abroad and writing Wang Baochuan), Xianggang wenxue (Hong Kong
Literature Monthly) 21 (1986): 94–99 (95).
94 Fang Zhong, “Wang Baochuan de biandao zhe Xiong Shiyi zaiyu guilai” (Xiong Shiyi,
adapter and director of Wang Baochuan, returned with glory), Tianjin Yi shi bao (Tianjin Social
Welfare), December 30, 1936, sec. 4, 14.
95 Lin Yutang’s review of Lady Precious Stream, T’ien Hsia Monthly 1, no. 1 (August 1935):
106–10 (108).
96 Wen Yuan-ning, “Lady Precious Stream,” The China Critic 7, no. 51 (December 20, 1934):
1244–45.
97 George Jean Nathan, “Barrie, Guitry and Some Others,” The Smart Set 64, no. 3 (1921):
131–37 (133–34). See also George Jean Nathan, The World in Falseface (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1923), 95–97.
98 J. B. Priestley, “Sir James Barrie,” The English Journal 18, no. 2 (1929): 106–19 (115, 119).
99 James Agate, Alarums and Excursions (New York: George H. Doran, 1922), 212.
100 Ibid., 215.
101 Ibid., 223.
102 “London Theatres,” The Stage, April 3, 1913, 20.
103 Desmond MacCarthy, “Drama: China and Cambridge,” The New Statesman, March 18,
1922, 673–75 (673).
Comparative Drama
185
104 “Chinese Play at Cambridge: ‘The Circle of Chalk,’” The Manchester Guardian, March 1,
1933, 10.
105 J. M. Bulloch, “Chinese Gem in an English Setting: ‘Lady Precious Stream,’” The Sunday
Times, July 15, 1934, 10.
106 Eric, “Lady Precious Stream,” Punch, December 12, 1934, 664–65.
107 Chen Shi, “Ping Wang Baochuan jiqi yanchu” (On Wang Baochuan and its performance),
Guowen zhoubao (China news weekly) 14, no. 3 (1937): 47–50.
108 Nancy Price, “The Theatre,” People’s National Theatre Magazine 1, no. 1 (1933): 7–9 (8).
109 Hsiung, “Afterthought,” 177.
110 Ibid., 168.
111 Nancy Price, “Make Holiday,” People’s National Theatre Magazine 2, no. 7 (July/August
1935): 13–15 (14–15).
112 Shaw, “Chin Chon Chino,” 489.
113 Craig, “Japanese Artists in the West,” 90.
114 Meyerhold on Theatre, trans. and ed. Edward Braun (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), 57.
115 Ibid., 141.
116 P. C., “A Chinese Play at the Duke of York’s Theatre,” The Manchester Guardian, March
28, 1913, 10; E. F. S., “‘The Yellow Jacket’ in an English Dress,” The Sketch, April 9, 1913, 10; “The
Yellow Jacket,” The Era, March 29, 1913, 14.
117 St. J. E. (St. John Ervine), “The Yellow Jacket,” The Observer, March 12, 1922, 11.
118 J. T. Grein, “The Week’s Premieres, Duke of York’s: ‘The Yellow Jacket,’” The Sunday Times,
March 30, 1913, 6.
119 J. T. Grein, The World of the Theatre: Impressions and Memoirs, March 1920–1921 (London:
William Heinemann, 1921), 30.
120 S. O., “Play of the Month: The Yellow Jacket,” The English Review, May 1913, 319–22 (319).
121 Ibid., 321.
122 Ibid., 322.
123 Hsiung, “Introduction,” in Lady Precious Stream, xvi. In his article for The Observer, Hsiung
spoke of “a long tradition” of Chinese theatre, in particular, its use of the property man: “However, we
must bear in mind that the present-day Chinese stage, on which these queer things were performed
[by the property man], is at least a few hundred years the senior of the Elizabethan stage, if not as
old as that of the Greeks. In poems of classical style it would never do to use such words as ‘motorcar’ and ‘radio,’ and on our stage how can any modern reformation be tolerated?” S. I. Hsiung, “The
Stage in China. The Kindly Property Man. Cups of Tea for the Actors,” The Observer, December
9, 1934, 10; “Some Conventions of the Chinese Stage,” People’s National Theatre Magazine 1, no.
13 (December 1934): 3–5. American author and critic Bosley Crowther noted that Hsiung was “a
shade tight-lipped” about the realistic theatre in China. See Bosley Crowther, “Inviting the Twain
to Meet,” The New York Times, January 26, 1936, X3. See also Eric Johns, “Eric Johns Discusses the
Chinese Theatre (in an Interview with S. I. Hsiung),” Theatre World 23, no. 122 (March 1935): 131.
124 Robert McKown, “There’s Always the Zoo,” Theatre World 23, no. 123 (April 1935): 154.
Min Tian
186
125 Bottomley, “Preface,” x.
126 Charles Morgan, “London Enjoys Some Chinese Tea,” The New York Times, December
30, 1934, X3.
127 Brooks Atkinson, “‘Lady Precious Stream,’ by Dr. S. I. Hsiung, or the Poor Gardener Who
Made Good,” New York Times, January 28, 1936, 15.
128 J. T. Grein, “The World of the Theatre,” The Illustrated London News, December 22, 1934, 1066.
129 W. A. Darlington, “Chinese Author’s English Play: Charming Romance at the Little,” The
Daily Telegraph, November 29, 1934, 10.
130 Carroll, “Chinese Ideas on Décor.”
131 James Agate, “A Week of Little Plays,” The Sunday Times, December 2, 1934, 6 (emphasis
original).
132 Sir Cedric Hardwicke, The Drama Tomorrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1936), 25, 27.