In this seminar, I will share the research from my forthcoming book Ibsen, theatre and the Chinese state: A hundred years of contestations. The book interrogates a hundred years of Chinese history from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party to the present day, refracted through representations of a western playwright on the Chinese stage. It is a study of the entanglements between politics and performance, between theatre and the state. In particular, I will talk about the second chapter of my book, which centres on Madame Mao's Nora performance.
My talk focuses on one of the greatest Ibsen myths in Chinese theatre—the 1935 production of A Doll’s House starring Lan Ping, later known as Jiang Qing or Madame Mao. Much about Jiang’s experience as ‘Nora’ in Shanghai in the 1930s is retrospectively created either by herself or by the Chinese state. As a ‘new woman’ in show business who later became China’s most prominent and vilified female political figure, Jiang Qing’s role as Nora was important in her self-image as an actress and politician. Several Western scholars have written semi-fictional biographies about her, including Roxane Witke, who was invited by Jiang herself to interview her in Beijing. But her performance has never been examined with scholarly vigour.
This chapter fills that gap by conducting a historiographical study of the performance based on newspaper archives and other primary material that were not available to many previous scholars. The study shows that Jiang was an active contributor to the Nora debate in 1935, sparked by the many Nora performances in that year, including her own. Her commitment to the women’s cause in the 1930s and her powerful and controversial life post-Nora picture an extremely complex female subjectivity in a patriarchal power structure.
The seminar is open to all, including scholars of Ibsen and China.
This seminar will be streamed via Zoom:
https://uio.zoom.us/j/69757971467?pwd=WIAy5MnnMdDj0BbIiILTlQSttm0rsV.1