By Man He
Reviewed by Barbara Jiawei Li
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December, 2025)
Man He, Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre: Intellectuals, Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s-1940s Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025. 360 pp. 9780472057559 (Paperback), 9780472077557 (Hardcover), 9780472905119 (Open Access).
Theatre is inherently a three-dimensional art form. Its essence lies not merely in texts, but in the dynamic interplay of acting, scenography, spatial design, and audience reception, which constitutes the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Because of this, scholars of theatre history are usually wary of two tendencies—namely, an overemphasis on scripts and a lopsided concentration on theatrical production. The former risks producing an incomplete, sometimes even distorted, historical narrative; the latter may be equally insufficient in reconstructing historical reality. All this is to emphasize that the evanescence of theatrical performance poses great challenges to historiography: performances end and documentation remains fragmented.
Seen in this light, Man He’s Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre: Intellectuals, Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s–1940s delivers on both counts: through extensive archival research, the book analyses playtexts while grounding them in their performance contexts. Man He calls this approach “backstage.” Backstage is “more than just a physical location”; it is “the nebulous realm through which an idea manifests, makes its first steps toward actualization, gains institutional support, and ultimately secures hegemonic power” (2). This approach requires attention both to texts and to the behind‑the‑scenes work that enables them, such as rehearsals, training, stage design, backstage rules, and the institutions and people who support the productions. It encourages scholars to tease out the archival traces of theatrical labor and thus reconstruct theatre history with greater details.
Through the lens of the backstage, Man He looks at the growing domination of modern Chinese theatre (huaju 話劇) between the two World Wars. The author focuses on huaju because she sees it as a central cultural arena where the idea of modern China was actively shaped (4). Rather than treating huaju as simply a Western‑influenced spoken drama that replaced traditional theatre, He shows that its real significance lies in the backstage worlds where scripts were revised, actors trained, costumes designed, institutions built, and political visions negotiated. These backstage processes brought together overseas students, cosmopolitan intellectuals, rural amateurs, government officials, and wartime refugees, all of whom used huaju to articulate China’s place in a global modernity.
The book presents a selection of pivotal case studies: Hong Shen’s 洪深 (1894–1955) U.S. staging of The Wedded Husband: A Realistic Chinese Play (TWH); a reappraisal of 1920s “realism” through Yu Shangyuan’s 余上沅 (1897–1970) plays and theory; an account of Tian Han 田漢 (1898–1968), Hong Shen, and Xiong Foxi’s 熊佛西 (1900–1965) reimagining of rural China; a study of the National Drama School’s (NDS) 國立戲劇專科學校 actor training, wartime curricula, and performances; and a spotlight on overlooked dramatists, archivists, and entrepreneurs whose works on “civilized drama” (文明戲), also referred to as “new drama,” forged an alternative canon to huaju. Drawing on these cases, the author argues that huaju is best understood as a collaborative and politically embedded practice, shaped not only by canonical works and figures but also by the often-overlooked efforts that made the theatre possible.
The book is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on Hong Shen and his long‑forgotten 1919 English‑language play TWH, written and staged while he was a student in at Ohio State University. The chapter builds on the author’s 2015 article “When S/He Is Not Nora: Hong Shen, Cosmopolitan Intellectuals, and Chinese Theatres in 1910s China and America,” published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and extends the original claim that TWH complicates the familiar Nora-centred narrative of huaju by weaving Confucian sentiment (情) and ritual (禮) into a post–World War I cosmopolitan frame. The result is a convincing intertextual analysis showing how Hong’s TWH indirectly draws on Bao Tianxiao’s 包天笑 (1876 – 1973) short story “A Strand of Hemp” (一縷麻) via two existing, influential theatrical reinterpretations: the new-style Peking opera version by Mei Lanfang 梅蘭芳 (1894 – 1961) and Qi Rushan 齊如山 (1877–1962), and the Spring Willow troupe’s Shanghai productions. The chapter also points out that Mei Lanfang’s traditional opera version was actually more radical, ending with the heroine’s suicide and sharply criticizing arranged marriage, while the progressive Spring Willow troupe retained Bao’s more conservative ending. This unexpected reversal supports the author’s larger argument that familiar labels such as “traditional,” “modern,” “conservative,” and “radical” do not map neatly onto the reality of early twentieth‑century Chinese theatre. By foregrounding TWH’s hitherto overlooked contexts of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic and the U.S. “yellow peril” discourse, Man He raises the stakes of responsibility and moral choice that confront the characters. Such historical perspicuity can also be found in the chapter’s subsequent reconstruction of Hong Shen’s lost English playscript, Rainbow (1919) from articles in the periodical press and from programs. Personal details such as how the foreign Chinese student-playwright was able to obtain excellent grades in his courses while simultaneously pursuing theatre adds argumentative liveliness to the chapter’s historical accuracy.
Chapter 2 reinterprets 1920s Chinese theatre through a fresh and bold reinterpretation of Yu Shangyuan’s works. Specifically, the author shows how Yu fused Ibsen’s “ocular realism” (realism as a way of seeing) with the neo-Confucian concept of “investigating things” (格物) as a path to self-cultivation. For Yu, realism is less about reproducing reality onstage than about guiding spectators’ perception. Although Yu Shangyuan is a familiar figure in modern Chinese theatre studies, the author’s use of gewu provides a fresh and original framework for interpreting his ideas. Chapter 2 also sketches the broader theatrical landscape of the late 1920s, including Yu Shangyuan’s 1923–1924 American sojourn, his productions of Yang Guifei 楊貴妃 (1924), Mutiny 兵變 (1924), Statue 塑像 (1928), and the National Theatre Movement (國劇運動, 1925–1926). A standout contribution is the attention to Mutiny and The Statue, two works that have hitherto received meagre attention. The author convincingly proposes that Mutiny is a Nora play instead of a social-problem play. Instead of diagnosing social ills, Mutiny centres on Miss Qian’s self-directed awakening and her clever, staged escape, echoing Nora’s departure in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. This shows that as early as Mutiny, Yu was already inviting readers to reflect critically on the 1920s Chinese stage and social realities, specifically, the intelligentsia’s veneration of Ibsen and the commercial theatre’s reliance on mechanical gimmicks. Statue, by contrast, reflects a self-conscious effort on the part of the playwright to come to terms with the failures of the National Theatre Movement.
I would suggest two additional sources for future scholarship on this issue of realism. The first is on the idea of xieyi (寫意). Building on Liu Siyuan’s research,[1] the author also conceptualizes xieyi as Yu’s synthesis of Chinese aesthetics with his encounter of Western modernist theatre. The idea of xieyi, however, can be further explored from the perspective of translation studies. Yu’s discussion of different modes of acting—xieshi 寫實, paibie 派別, neigong 內工, and xieyi—corresponds to the terms “impersonation,” “type cast,” “inner truth,” and “presentational,” which Yu translated from American theatrical producer Kenneth Macgowan’s (1888–1963) “New Acting for Old.”[2] Noting Yu’s translational adaptation of such concepts would usefully address the influence of American theatre on Yu’s theoretical ideas. A second source concerns the production of Yang Guifei. The play, which was titled The Never-ending Sorrow at the time of performance, received a brief English-language review in Chinese Students’ Monthly (vol. 20, no. 3) with a summary of each act.[3] If this review had been included in the author’s discussion, it would have offered insights into the play’s structure and themes, and also help ground discussions of spectatorship and staging in concrete historical contexts.
Chapter 3 traces huaju’s rural settings between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s. It focuses on three key cases: Tian Han’s The Night the Tiger Was Caught (獲虎之夜, 1924), Hong Shen’s Wukui Bridge (五奎橋, 1930), the first installment of Hong Shen’s Rural Trilogy (農村三部曲, 1930–34), and Xiong Foxi’s Cross the River (過渡, 1935) performed in Ding County (定縣), Hebei. Building on existing scholarship (such as Luo Liang’s excellent study of Tian Han),[4] the author adds two fresh readings of the The Night the Tiger Was Caught. First, the play resonates with urban intellectuals’ nostalgia for an unattainable rural homeland. Second, the author links the tiger symbolism to “Wu Song Fights a Tiger,” arguing that it reimagines heroic individualism as a utopian vision of rural life.
The analysis of Hong Shen’s Wukui Bridge is notably detailed. By examining Hong Shen’s 1930 essays in Shen Pao where he deliberately distanced himself from leftist politics, the author argues that Hong’s trilogy went beyond leftist drama; instead, it represented Hong’s idea to bridge urban-rural divides and foster empathy across social classes. Building on Xiaomei Chen’s earlier research,[5] the author uses the concept of the “well-made play” to examine Wukui Bridge, highlighting Hong Shen’s creative process of structuring the plays first and then adding the narratives. This formal emphasis is linked to Hong’s concept of “scientific sympathy,” the idea that a playwright should seek to understand others through observation rather than relying on emotion alone. In this view, writers study real life and then use that knowledge to create convincing characters. The section also stands out for its attention to stage performance, particularly the May 1933 production of Wukui Bridge by Fudan University’s drama troupe, which situated the play within its broader theatrical and cultural setting.
Chapter 3 concludes with Xiong Foxi’s experiment in Ding County, the definitive success story of rural theatre. This section shows how Xiong Foxi and Yang Cunbin 楊村彬 (1911–1989) staged Cross the River through an innovative production method inspired by Russian theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s (1874–1940) “biomechanics,” a theory of actor training that emphasizes the expressive power of the physical body. Man He argues that Xiong trained the peasant actors to use “biomechanical” (力學底) acting, in which physical exertion such as sweating, pounding, lifting, and singing, became the core theatrical language. Drawing on review articles written by scholars who paid visits to Ding County, the author emphasizes the importance of backstage labor, including stage architecture, rehearsals, and the process of “peasantizing” intellectuals, thereby arguing that Ding County offered a powerful challenge to urban box-stage naturalism. The cases in chapter 3 are all familiar to theatre history readers, but the author reinterprets them through original concepts, from the “urban nostalgia” in Tian Han’s case to Hong Shen’s employment of “scientific sympathy” and “biomechanics” acting in the Ding County experiment.
Chapter 4 examines how huaju during the 1930s–40s became institutionalized through new approaches to acting, voice, and training, especially during the national crisis of the Sino‑Japanese War, focusing on the National Drama School (NDS), the only state supported theatre academy in China at the time. The chapter begins with Tian Han’s 1934 play Extras (臨時演員), which portrays professional actors bungling their performance while ordinary people seize the moment to rush offstage, shout patriotic slogans, and charge into the audience, actions that ultimately eclipse the onstage performance. This play becomes a lens through which the author asks what it meant, in the sound‑saturated environment of 1930s Shanghai, for huaju actors to speak effectively and mobilize audiences during a national crisis. Debates among Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), Yu Shangyuan, and Cheng Yanqiu 程硯秋 further reveal a shift from huaju’s early emphasis on literary dialogue to a new concern with vocal delivery, emotional resonance, and sonic impact.
The narrative then turns to the foundation of NDS. Established in Nanjing in 1935, the school sought to professionalize huaju and train a new generation of “men of theatre” who could serve national goals. After the Japanese invasion, NDS evacuated along with other refugees, operating briefly in Changsha and Chongqing before settling from 1938 to 1945 in Jiang’an 江安, a small rural town in Sichuan. The author reconstructs the NDS’s wartime history by leveraging its understudied archival records of its performance venue, syllabi, voice‑training manuals, and detailed scoring system for actor training. These materials show that NDS developed a rigorous curriculum, designed by Jin Yunzhi (金韻芝 b. 1912) and Wan Jiabao 萬家寶 (aka Cao Yu 曹禺, 1910–1996), that blended Stanislavski’s system, Chinese operatic training, and wartime improvisational practices. They also reveal how Chen Zhice 陳治策 (1894–1954) further systematized performance through his “vocal expression” theory and the crafting of “acting scores” (演譜) that coordinated speech and gesture. This focus on NDS is particularly significant because, the Guomindang–backed institution has been largely marginalized in PRC-centric theatre histories. By foregrounding these archival traces, Man He recovers this crucial dimension of huaju’s development.
Chapter 5 raises a pivotal methodological question: how did huaju become codified as “official” history and, crucially, who wielded the power to shape that narrative? The author argues that canonization is inherently political, which was dictated by those who document theatre, who select materials that are deemed worthy of preservation, and who are granted the privilege by state power to narrate the orthodox history. This argument is anchored by three significant yet controversial “episodes” in huaju-making history. First, the chapter revisits one of the wenmingxi veterans, Zhu Shuangyun 朱雙雲 (1889–1942), who framed early huaju as a professional practice. Second, two critical theatre libraries are examined—Song Chunfang’s 宋春舫 (1892–1938) collections in Qingdao and Shu Weiqing’s 舒蔚青 (1908–1942) collections in Hankou. Here, archiving and cataloguing emerge as essential forms of backstage labor. Third, the chapter analyses the wartime meta-drama Annals of Theatre 戲劇春秋 (1943), revealing the key role of the director Ying Yunwei 應雲衛 (1904 – 1967) in theatre-making. Ying Yunwei navigated Nationalist censorship, secured funding from Shanghai “business” elites like Du Yuesheng 杜月笙 (1888–1951), coordinated with theatre owners, and worked with newspaper editors to publicize productions. His political, commercial, and artistic networks ensured that theatre productions could continue despite political instability.
I found the discussion on Ying Yunwei and Annals of Theatre particularly insightful. Although the play was written by Xia Yan 夏衍 (1900–1995), Song Zhidi 宋之的 (1914–1956), and Yu Ling 于伶 (1907–1997) during wartime Chongqing, the analysis intentionally steps away from the playwrights central to script-focused research to highlight instead Ying Yunwei’s role in organizing, fundraising, and directing. This shift redefines the huaju canon to go beyond playwrights and texts to emphasize cultural entrepreneurship and production labour—elements crucial to the book’s governing idea of backstaging. By establishing Ying Yunwei as a figure central to the often-invisible work behind the scenes, the author demonstrates an effective rewriting of huaju’s history.
Overall, this book’s most compelling move is to re-center and forefront the backstage. Rather than treating huaju as a bookshelf of celebrated scripts, it understands huaju through its complex, multiple production processes, including acting drills, scenography, vocal technique, school curricula, budgets, logistics, and troupe management. In Man He’s account, huaju is as much an institutional practice as it is a literary one. Rehearsals, promptbooks, and touring routines matter as much as dialogues on the page. This backstaging approach is particularly inspiring in generating further questions for Chinese and non-Chinese theatre scholarship: how should we rewrite theatre histories that have so heavily privileged texts? What new methods and archives are needed? And how might the book’s backstage method apply to the study of other national theatre modernities?
Equally important, Man He’s book remaps modern Chinese theatre’s canonization onto the global stage. Huaju emerges not as a straight line of “great plays,” but as a network that runs from student experiments in Columbus, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York; from urban–rural practices in Shanghai and Ding County to wartime institutions in Nanjing and Jiang’an, and to self-canonization in Chongqing. Within this network, marginalized figures, cultural entrepreneurs, and student-actors emerge as quintessential players in the field. Through comparisons, American campus theatres become counterparts to Chinese rural stages; Confucian temples repurposed as theatres stand alongside urban proscenium houses; gramophone and cinema cultures meet the embodied voice onstage. With each body chapter, connections between these various backstages strengthen, compelling readers to further examine overlooked or misinterpreted cases in theatre history so as to weave them into broader socio-historical fabrics.
On a personal note, the author acknowledges the book as a collective effort, likening its “backstage” to the collaborative nature of theatre-making itself. She has mentioned an endearing support system that includes teachers, peers, family, and mostly importantly, her mother, a former factory-troupe actress who also took the cover photo. Here, what occurs behind the scenes quite literally makes the frontstage. It is with this spirit that Man He’s contributions should be recognized in both theatre history and cultural/media studies.
Barbara Jiawei Li
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
NOTES:
[1] Liu, Siyuan. “The Cross Currents of Modern Theatre and China’s National Theatre Movement of 1925-1926.” Asian Theatre Journal 33, no. 1 (2016): 1–35.
[2] Macgowan, Kenneth, and Robert Edmond Jones. “New Acting for Old.” In Continental Stagecraft. New York: Harcourt, Brach and Company, 1922, 91–105.
[3] Yu, Y. C. “A Report of the China Night.” The Chinese Students’ Monthly 20, no. 3 (1924): 66–67.
[4] Luo, Liang. The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
[5] Chen, Xiaomei. “Tian Han and the Southern Society Phenomenon: Networking the Personal, Communal, and Cultural.” In Kirk Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies of Republican China. New York: Lexington Books, 2008, 241-278.