ABSTRACT
Ibsen, one of the most popular and infl uential Western playwrights in China, greatly infl uenced the Chinese cultural and theater scene of the 1920s and 1930s. In 2006, the Year of Ibsen, his plays were once again staged extensively in China, where they aroused a renewed interest among contemporary audiences. What was the reason for this revival? To answer this question, I would like to refer to Ibsen’s own statement, made in defense against the severe critical attacks on his Ghosts: “All these fading and decrepit fi gures who have pounced on my play [Ghosts] will one day receive their crushing judgment in the literary histories of the future . . . My book belongs to the future.”1 Such a self-assessment sounds radical for his time, but Ibsen’s prophecy did, in fact, come true-at least in terms of the critical and creative reception of his plays in China during the late 1990s and the early twenty-fi rst century. More than 100 years have now passed since Ibsen’s death in 1906. Still, many of his plays such as A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder and Peer Gynt are being performed on Chinese stages and favorably received by contemporary Chinese audiences and theater critics. In the past 10 years, there have been four major, international conferences held in Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan on Ibsen, his theatrical heritage and the reception of his plays
in the Chinese context. Certain Chinese directors, such as Wu Xiaojiang, Sun Huizhu and Lin Zhaohua, have directed new Ibsen productions by adapting them to Chinese idioms. These productions have also attracted the attention of Scandinavian audiences. The Year of Ibsen marked the beginning of another period of “Ibsen fever” in China. Ibsen’s nineteenthcentury plays are still being performed and appreciated by contemporary audiences in our postmodern society. In part, this is due to the fact that his plays anticipated the present-day social and political realities of China. But as I have pointed out elsewhere, Ibsen was fi rst and foremost an artist and not a revolutionary thinker; he was, specifi cally, an artist of the theater.2 His great appeal to audiences and critics largely stems from the contemporary performances of his plays. Since I focus on the Chinese performances of An Enemy of the People in this chapter, I begin with a historical outline of its productions on Chinese stages during different periods before analyzing one of the more recent productions.
