Cao Yu

Cao Yu a Chinese dramatist of the twentieth century (1910-1996) generally regarded as the greatest playwright of the modern Chinese theatre. His tragedies, above all Thunderstorm and Sunrise, brought psychological depth and tragic grandeur to the spoken drama and gave it a body of work that ranks with the classic European stage.

Family and Education

Cao Yu, born Wan Jiabao on 24 September 1910 in Tianjin, came from a wealthy and somewhat declining family. His father had studied in Japan and held bureaucratic hopes that were frustrated by the politics of the time, and the atmosphere of the household was one of frustrated ambition, genteel poverty and repressed conflict. This world of embittered elders and stifled children became the raw material of his plays.

His mother died when he was an infant and he was raised by a stepmother who loved the theatre and took him as a boy to the opera and to the popular plays of Tianjin. The spectacle and the music of the Chinese stage entered his imagination early, and he learned to feel the emotional power of a scene long before he read a modern play.

He attended Nankai Middle School in Tianjin, a school with a strong tradition of student drama, and then studied at Tsinghua University in Beijing. At Nankai he acted in productions of Western and Chinese plays, taking the female roles as was then the custom, and at Tsinghua he read widely in classical and modern literature and began to write. He was drawn to the great tragic dramatists, above all the Greeks and the modern Europeans.

Thunderstorm and Sunrise

Cao Yu's first play, Thunderstorm, was completed in 1933 while he was still a student and was published and staged in 1934. It depicts the collapse of a wealthy family across a single day and night, as old secrets of adultery, exploitation and betrayal pour out in a storm of disclosure. Its concentration, its atmospheric unity and its tragic force astonished audiences.

Thunderstorm is set in a provincial household and moves with the inevitability of classical tragedy toward the destruction of its principal figures. The play combined the techniques of the modern European stage with a Chinese setting and a Chinese sense of family and fate, and it gave the spoken drama a work of genuine tragic weight. It has been revived and filmed many times.

Sunrise followed in 1936 and widened his canvas from the drawing room to the whole of a great city. Structured around a gallery of characters from the underworld, the business world, the bureaucracy and the poor, it portrays a society in moral collapse. Its fragmentary, panoramic method was a departure from the classical unity of the first play and showed his willingness to experiment.

Other Major Plays

Cao Yu continued to write throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The Wilderness, set in the countryside, adapted the forms of revenge tragedy to a rural setting, while Peking Man examined the decline of an old scholarly family and the sense of a civilisation in decay. His later Beijing plays turned to the historical stage with a more reflective and elegiac mood.

In 1940 he wrote Beijing Man, a play whose title refers to the fossil of early humanity and which uses the discovery of the relic as a symbol of the search for what is enduring in Chinese culture. After 1949 he wrote Bright Sky and other works that adapted his talent to the new requirements of the theatre of the state, and he worked on the reform of the operatic repertoire.

His range extended to libretti and to translations, and he was a careful craftsman who revised his plays repeatedly. His dialogue carries the pressure of suppressed emotion, and his stagecraft, with its use of offstage sound, storm and darkness, gave the Chinese stage a new vocabulary of atmosphere. He is at his best in the portrayal of families in crisis.

Career, Politics and the Theatrical World

Cao Yu held a variety of theatrical and literary posts and was for many years a leading figure in the professional theatre of the state. He served as director of an experimental dramatic company and of theatrical institutions, and he was active in the national writers' association. He represented Chinese literature at international gatherings and travelled widely.

His position exposed him to the political campaigns of the mid-century. He was criticised at times for the pessimistic tone of his early work and was obliged to defend his inheritance from the pre-revolutionary stage. He responded by continuing to write and by taking part in the work of reform, though the pressures left their marks on his subsequent plays.

In his later years he was honoured as the dean of Chinese dramatists. He was involved in the staging of his own plays and in the training of younger writers, and he gave encouragement to a new generation of theatrical artists. His presence connected the great years of the 1930s with the theatre of the reform era.

Legacy and Assessment

Cao Yu died in Beijing on 13 December 1996. By then his reputation was secure as the foremost dramatist of modern China, and his principal plays had been translated and performed around the world. Thunderstorm and Sunrise in particular had entered the permanent repertoire and the curricula of schools and universities.

Critics praise his ability to fuse the technique of Ibsen and O Neill with a Chinese sense of family and destiny, and to create characters whose private tragedies carry the weight of a whole society. His early plays remain the model against which later Chinese dramatists are measured, and they are read as documents of an age of transition as well as works of art.

His influence on the spoken drama was decisive. He showed that the new theatre could attain the intensity of tragedy without abandoning its social and psychological truth, and he gave Chinese audiences a body of work they could call their own. His name stands at the centre of the modern Chinese stage, and his best plays continue to move audiences with their stormy vision of grief and fate.

See also

• Thunderstorm
• Sunrise (play)
• Modern Chinese drama
• Tragedy