By Tarryn Li-Min Chun
Reviewed by Yizhou Huang
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2025)
Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China University of Michigan Press, 2024. 338 pp. 9780472056569 (paper); 9780472076567 (cloth); OPEN ACCESS.
Tarryn Li-Min Chun’s Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China reconsiders modern Chinese theater history from the 1920s to the 1980s through the focal point of stage technologies such as scene design, lighting, and stage properties. It is a much-welcomed departure from existing studies of Chinese theater history that foreground major historical events, figures, texts, and productions. This is not to say that Chun deliberately steers away from these more conventional topics but that she brings fresh perspectives to canonical as well as lesser-known performances by employing “technics as method” (20). This entails expanding the archives to include “contemporaneous technical manuals, treatises, handbooks, and even scientific and technical materials and histories” (21), asking targeted questions such as how did theater makers create illusions of the thunderstorm in Cao Yu’s 曹禺 Thunderstorm (雷雨, 1934), and “examining technical objects in situ” (21). The dynamic relationship between theater and technology in China’s century of revolutions, Chun shows, was always imbricated with the specific historical moment and its particular social politics.
Chapter 1, “Mobilizing Illumination: Lighting, Scenography, and Affective Arousal in Early Huaju,” accounts for the growing interest in theater technology, especially scenography and lighting, in the 1920s and the 1930s. The chapter starts by introducing readers to a brief history of the emergence of modern stage technology and its close association with huaju 話劇 (spoken drama) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Notably, Chun demonstrates that such knowledge circulated not only through fully realized stage productions but also through theater education organizations, public-facing theater journals, and print monographs. As prior scholarship has established, Chinese theater, both xiqu 戲曲 (sung drama or traditional Chinese opera) and huaju 話劇 (spoken drama), were not only entertainment but also means of instruction, which included jiaohua 教化, qimeng 啟蒙 (enlightenment), or jiuwang 救亡 (national salvation). Stage technology was part and parcel of this educational project. Chun highlights how this project took place on the global stage: developments in Japan, Europe, the US, and Russia were introduced to China by theater practitioners like Hong Shen 洪深 and Chen Dabei 陳大悲, seminal figures in huaju history who studied abroad and/or read foreign languages. Chun then directs her attention to the 1933 Chinese production of Roar, China! (怒吼吧中國) by the Shanghai Theater Society (上海戲劇協社). An anti-imperialist play by Soviet playwright Sergei Tret’iakov (also spelled Tretyakov), Roar, China! was based on the 1926 Wanxian Incident (萬縣慘案). With the play’s reference to a recent event serving leftist politics, its set, which featured a British gunboat, emphasized technological innovation. Roar, China!’s execution of the first blackout quick change in Chinese theater history, according to Chun, “[aligned] the mobilization of theatrical labor onstage with the politics of the play itself” (52-53, original emphasis), rendering the people themselves as “a technology of revolution” (55) to revolt against the technology-savvy Western powers, who in the play are depicted as using gunboats, telegraphy, and cameras. In doing so, leftist artists, through praxis as well as paratheatrical technical texts, explored stagecraft’s potential to elicit affective responses from audiences while teaching them how to comprehend the technical dimensions of the play’s anti-imperialist message. This thoroughly analyzed case study is indicative of Chun’s approach writ large: technology serves as both the means to execute the production as well as its end to educate spectators in realpolitik.
Chapter 2, “Dramaturgical Technologies: Engineering Atmosphere in the First Golden Age of Huaju,” delves into the relationship between playwriting and technology. During the second Sino-Japanese War, playwrights paid increasing attention to scripting design elements and special effects into their stage directions. After contextualizing the general development of playwriting leading up to this historical period, Chun examines a handful of productions and their specific employment of technologies: in his Thunderstorm and Sunrise日出 (1936), Cao Yu experimented with how to depict thunder/lightning and changing light, respectively; Xia Yan’s 夏衍 Under Shanghai Eaves (上海屋檐下, 1937) explored the use of scenery; This Era (這一代 , 1939) by He Mengfu 賀孟斧 tackled shadows; and Song Zhide’s 宋之的 Foggy Chongqing (霧重慶, 1940) investigated the representation of fog. Comparing stage directions with technical theater manuals, Chun shows that scripted stage technology contributed to plot development, characterization, atmosphere, and audiences’ emotional responses. It is important to note that the examples included in this chapter reside on two ends of a spectrum: while Cao Yu, Xia Yan, and Song Zhide wrote for well-equipped modern theaters, He Mengfu had to adopt controllable design elements because his play was intended to mobilize spectators for war efforts and was usually staged in more rudimentary settings. Theater, therefore, was “a technology of war” as well as “an art of control” (94).
Chapter 3, “Socialist Utopian Special Effects: Technological Fantasy on the Seventeen Years Stage,” proposes the concept of “technological fantasy” to define homegrown methods of resolving technological difficulties in theatrical productions. In line with the spirit of self-reliance promoted in the Seventeen Years period (1949–66), these methods also facilitated “socialist utopianism and science fantasy” (119). This is most evident in Chun’s analysis of the “homegrown” revolving stage (土轉台) in Tian Han’s 田汉 Fantasia of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (十三陵水库畅想曲, 1958). Instead of constructing an actual turntable, the production rotated the backdrop and set pieces to create the optical illusion of a revolving stage. Similarly, when the creative team of Sentinels under the Neon Lights (霓虹灯下的哨兵, 1963) simulated electric neon lights by shining stage lights on reflective, glossy tubes, they adapted traditional aesthetics of the illusory (虚) and the real (实) for socialist causes. The chapter ends with a discussion of the connections between projected theatrical backdrops and slide projection—referred to both as huandeng (幻灯) and tu dianying (土电影)—as a socialist mass medium. Such in-depth exploration of the homegrown (tu) ethos and innovations calls to mind Eugenia Lean’s writing on “vernacular industrialism,”[1] but the technology transfer and domestication that Chun discusses emphasizes a distinctive socialist modernism whereby technology was to serve the proletariat.
Chapter 4, “Model Ingenuity: Technical Mentality and Practicality in Cultural Revolution Yangbanxi,” moves forward to the decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Many of the concerns discussed in the previous chapters culminate here, including stagecraft’s affective power, scripting technologies, and the control of live performance for ideological purposes. Chun draws on Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “technical mentality,” which “encompasses ‘cognition, affect and will’ and is ‘endowed with a ‘collective dimension’ that enables a bridging ‘between technicity and culture, in the process of constituting the ‘technical culture’” (146), to shed light on the detailed stagecraft of the revolutionary model operas (革命样板戏). A rich array of examples is examined, including the eponymous lantern in The Red Lantern (红灯记, 1970), the lighting instrument schedule for Taking Tiger Mountain (智取威虎山, 1970), and performance editions of the model operas whose incisive scope and details earned them the moniker “production bibles” (161). Yet, similar to the technological fantasy discussed in the previous chapter, the meticulously recorded ideal production was always subject to technical failure, when, for instance, performed in less-equipped venues.
Chapter 5, “Theater as Technoscience: Research, Design, and Nuclear Physics in the Post-Mao Era,” turns to the early post-Mao years (1978 to the early 1980s). Chun observes a “technoscientific shift” (177) in theater as artists not only produced plays about science but also engaged in public discourses about the relationship between science and theater. The two productions discussed here also point to the bigger issues at stake. The seminal 1979 production of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo (伽利略传), co-directed by Chen Yong 陈颙 and Huang Zuolin 黄佐临, reflected on theater’s role in revolutions of the past decades and redirected theater to serve reason and reform. Both Huang and Chen drew connections between theater-makers and scientists, an idea echoed by the rapid development and institutionalization of stagecraft. Carrying the argument of theater as technoscience forward, Atoms and Love (原子与爱情, 1980), a seldom studied production by the General Political Department Huaju Troupe of the People’s Liberation Army (中国人民解放军总政话剧团), was based on extensive research and field work done at national defense science institutes. It revolved around the successful detonation of China’s first atomic bomb in 1964 and the persecution of one scientist during the Cultural Revolution. Building on a closer look at the design choices in these two productions, the chapter ends with an observation about the diversifying approaches to scenography in the Reform Era. As Chinese artists turned away from homegrown technologies to more global developments, and from an amateur ethos to professionalism, scenography shed its earlier obsession with the recreation of reality, be it factual or ideal, to embrace non-illusionistic alternatives.
Revolutionary Stagecraft contributes to scholarship on Chinese cultural modernity from a niche but important perspective. Chinese stagecraft in the twentieth century evolved through both non-socialist and socialist cosmopolitanism, and indigenous adaptations. Chun’s analysis leans more heavily on huaju than xiqu, an understandable decision given the latter’s more troubled relationship with modernity. (But this just means that a monograph-length study of xiqu stagecraft that updates Gong Hede’s 龚和德 seminal Stage Design Researches [舞台美术研究, 1987] is much needed). In the coda, Chun briefly discusses how technics as method can be applied to more recent works of varying scales and genres from experimental productions by Wang Chong 王翀 to real-scene landscape performances by Zhang Yimou 张艺谋. Chun’s intervention, therefore, could prove generative to studies of the postmodern and the postdramatic as well.
Chun joins theater scholar W. B. Worthen in thinking about “the technologies that have historically defined the place, practice, and medium of theatrical performance.”[2] As the development of AI and the threat to the humanities worldwide increasingly require scholars to make a case for the arts, Chun proves that theater helped innovate technology just as the latter contributed to the development of Chinese theatrical modernity. Given’s the book’s focus on revolution and leftist politics, it might be fruitful to take into consideration the convoluted relationship between science and Marxism. This, however, is a minor note given Chun’s careful contextualization of the historical period and topics under discussion in each chapter. Revolutionary Stagecraft is a must-read for scholars and students of theater and performance studies and of modern China in general. The book is also relevant to scholars working in media studies and history of science, especially those who are interested in the epistemological and political dimensions of technologies.
Yizhou Huang
Barnard College
NOTES:
[1] Eugenia Lean. Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.
[2] W. B. Worthen. Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 9, original emphasis.