Chinese young people

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and theater

A difficult dialogue

Young people and theater in China nowadays. It’s a difficult dialogue, a quite impossible dialogue. In China, where authority deeply controls people, internet is the most important communications medium used by young people. Chinese young people, like most of all young people in the world, like to log on to use emails, to chat, to play with on-line gaming. They do prefer pc to theatre.

We did a journey through China, from Southern provinces to Beijing and to Shanghai and we asked young people we met if they like drama or not. Their replies surprised us a lot. We had spoken with young people between 19 and 23 not only students but also employees, waitresses etc. Most of them said us internet is the most important of the “visual arts” loved by Chinese young generation. Drama is enjoyed by them only after internet, movies and television.

Wei Xia is responsible for marketing and she works for an American multinational company in Guangzhou, in the South of China, one of the most industrialized areas in the world. Wei prefers to be called with her Western style name “Simone” and tells us she prefers movies to drama. She occasionally goes to the theatre and only when she need to relax. She says: «I watch a play to not think about anything». Movies give her the emotions theatre can’t give her «I like to watch above all contemporary Western plays. Unfortunately the cultural background of Guangzhou is very different from Beijing or Shanghai. Here there are some acting companies which stage good traditional Chinese plays but young people who work till late evening can’t go to the theatre». Simone Wei almost every day stays in office till late and she comes back home only at 10 or 11 p.m. Chinese young people work a lot like her.

How about Beijing? We went to Beijing to know if there are more opportunities for young people to go to the theatre. In Beijing, the Chinese Opera city, it seems paradoxical that Chinese people prefer Western style stage to Chinese traditional theatre. Only Gao, a 20 years old Beijing University student from Shandong, loves Beijing Opera and prefers it to Western pieces staged in the capital’s playhouses. Though it is quite impossible to find a young Chinese person who likes Beijing Opera. Only people in their forties begin to appreciate Chinese Opera. The same happens in Japan and Korea, where young people don’t like traditional theatre. For this reason lots of American style musicals in Chinese or Korean languages were recently put on in China and Korea. Some of them have an unwilled funny side.
Zhang, another 20 years old Beijing University student from Hebei province, prefers Italian Grand Opera to Beijing Opera. He says: «I love Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”. I’ve watched it three times and I desire to go to Italy to watch it again».
Chinese young people like most of all Western playwrights, like Susan Cooper and Agatha Christie. However Miao and Shuo, 21 years old students, love Cáo Yǔ (曹禺, 1910 – 1996), one of the most representative Chinese playwrights of twentieth-century. Cáo Yǔ was one of the forbidden writers during the Maoist Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and he was partially rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping. Miao and Shuo like Léiyǔ (雷雨, Thunderstorm, 1933), one of the well-known Cáo Yǔ’s plays inspired by Western theatre and concerning an incest occurrence. Miao and Shuo, like lots of Young Chinese students, read playwrights of huàjù (话剧), the Chinese cultural movement of authors like Chen Duxiu and Hu Shih who harked back to Western dramatists.

Chinese young people are attracted not only to Western style drama but also to Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese stage shows. Yue, a young waitress of a Shanghai bar, comes from Zheijiang province. She has a very special predilection to contemporary Japanese theatre, even if she did watch it live but only on Youtube. Yue is a chain reader of manga, Japanese world-famous comics. She tells us her dream while tidying up bar glasses: «I would like to go to Tokyo to study acting and to become an actress of Takarazuka Revue». Takarazuka (宝塚歌劇団) is a Japanese musical theatre made of actresses only in which the male roles are played by women. For this reason Yue put a Japanese grammar book near the cash register. When in bar there are few customers, she uses to open the book and to study Japanese language. For Chinese young people dreams are plans to fulfil with strength of will and hard work. And Moon, this is the meaning of the name Yue, seems to have yet the personal appeal of "prima donna".

Also in China, one of the last kingdoms to be considered different and far away, young people resemble each other more and more. In the Beijing Opera country Chinese traditional stage shows are rarely watched by young people who, like other global younger generations, prefer hybrid shows made of movies and television together, more comfortable and easy to be found on line than to be watched on stage.

Floriano Terrano