ABSTRACT
Right after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) ended, the theatre scene in China was alive with plays that tugged at the heartstrings of a nation still licking its deep psychological and physical wounds. However, these plays still adhered to the realist mode that had dominated in China for over half a century. In 1979, the China Youth Theater mounted Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo, which harbingered the (re)introduction of modern Western classics as represented by Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Arthur Miller. Adaptations of these modern classics exerted powerful agency in reviving and reshaping the Chinese drama in the 1980s.
