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Bertolt Brecht is one of numerous overseas dramatists who have influenced Chinese theatre. He was introduced to China as early as the 193os, almost at the exact time that Brecht himself witnessed a Peking Opera performance by Mei Lanfang in Moscow and wrote an essay entitled "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting."1 It was not until the end of the 1950s, however, that Chinese theatre really paid attention to, and was influenced by, Brecht.
In 1959, according to a cultural agreement between the People's Republic of China and the then Federal Republic of Germany, Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children was to be produced in Shanghai, directed by Huang Zuolin, who had studied in Europe during the 193os and who was at that time Vice-President (and soon to become President) of the Shanghai People's Art Theatre. Although there were only fourteen performances of the play and the attendance was not more than 40 per cent, it nevertheless initiated Brecht's first breakthrough among Chinese theatre circles. At the same time, the first Chinese edition of theatrical works by Brecht was published by a team of translators headed by Feng Zhi, an expert on German literature.2 It collected thirty-seven poems and three plays: Mother Courage and Her Children, Senora Carrar's Rifles, and Puntila and His Man Matti. In conjunction with the rehearsals for Mother Courage, Huang Zuolin delivered a lecture at the Shanghai People's Art Theatre on Brecht's theatrical practice and theory, which was later published in Theatre Research.3 Essays on Mother Courage and Her Children and about Brecht were also to be seen in theatre magazines in Beijing and Shanghai at the time.
In 1962, Huang Zuolin prompted a second breakthrough for Brecht in China. A group of influential theatre people gathered in Guangzhou for a symposium on spoken drama, opera, and children's plays, focussing on how to increase and improve Chinese theatre production. Huang Zuolin put forward his idea that people should be tolerant of all kinds of styles, different approaches, and a multidimensional understanding of theatre and drama, not only the realist approach to theatre represented in China by Stanislavsky. Later published as "A Talk on the Concept of Theatre," Huang's paper analysed Brecht's Alienation Effect and offered a comparative study of Brecht, Stanislavsky, and...