Contemporary British Theatre and the Imaging of China

Ashley Thorpe is Reader in Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London, UK. His previous monograph on Chinese drama, Performing China on the London Stage: Chinese Opera and Global Power, 1759-2008 (Palgrave 2016), explored the effects of transnational and intercultural encounters through an exploration of Chinese performance forms (specifically xiqu) in London. The co-edited volume Contesting British Chinese Culture (Palgrave 2018) included analysis of the impact of Arts Council funding on British Chinese performance, whilst the co-edited Asian City Crossings: Pathways of Performance Through Hong Kong and Singapore (2021) explored transnational theatre ecologies outside of the prevailing East-West dynamic.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: Poststructuralism, Dialectics, and the Shadow of Brecht.- Chapter 2: “China is poor because it is unjust. We must prove it, comrade”: the Language of Revolution in David Hare’s Fanshen (1975).- Chapter 3: “China is the mirror in which the West looks for reassurance she is beautiful”: Anders Lustgarten’s The Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie.- Chapter 4: The Poetics of Quotation in Howard Brenton’s #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei (2013).- Chapter 5: “The Envelope of Empty Speech”: Language, Feeling, Action and Inaction in Howard Barker’s In the Depths of Dead Love (2016).- Chapter 6: “Man is not improved by the hurt of others”: Sympathetic Identification in Peter Nichols’s Poppy (1982).- Chapter 7: A Dialectics of Cooperation in Paul Sirett’s Running the Silk Road (2008).- Chapter 8: “A photograph is a mirror, what we are asked to read is the familiar”: The West, the East, and Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica (2013).