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Introduction
Since 1731 when Joseph de Prénare translated into English one Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhaos (赵氏孤儿, or Zhaoshi Gu’er), there has been a steady increase in the translation of Chinese plays over the past three centuries. Among the myriad Chinese plays translated abroad, The Romance of the Western Chamber (hereafter referred to as Western Chamber) holds a prominent position in Chinese literary history, akin to the esteemed status of the renowned novel A Dream of Red Chamber (红楼梦, or Honglou Meng). Western Chamber is even esteemed as “the most famous Chinese play through the ages” by William Dolby (1976, p. 48), a Scottish authority on Chinese play, and “the most globally successful Chinese play – in any dialect – in history” by Ashley Thorpe (2019, p. 84), a scholar of drama and theatre of the University of London. To date, there have been 28 English translations of this play, yet only three of them have been performed on stage.
S. I. Hsiung (熊式一, 1902–1991), a playwright and translator, is acclaimed as the first Chinese writer to have his English translations performed on the London stage. However, his translation of Western Chamber (published in 1935 and staged in 1938) and its subsequent performance failed to replicate the triumph of his inaugural play translation onstage, Lady Precious Stream (published in 1934 and staged in 1935). While Lady Precious Stream enjoyed nearly 1000 performances in theatres of London and deemed as “widely successful adaption of a Chinese play … in England and the United States” (Du, 2016, p. 347), Western Chamber had a modest run of 18 performances in the West End of London. The reviewer’s response to Western Chamber was tepid, as this thirteenth-century play lacks significant events, and the opera-inspired staging conventions are overly simplistic. In fact, when compared to Lady Precious Stream, it is considered a profound failure (Thorpe, 2016, pp. 128-131) or “an unsuccessful 1936 adaptation” (Thorpe, 2019, p. 92). The marked disparity in the reception of these two plays among British theatregoers has piqued researchers’ curiosity, prompting explorations into the underlying reasons.
These explorations primarily focus on individual plays, offering detailed studies of specific works, and a majority of these studies probe into the success of Lady...