Contemporary Chinese Theatre

Chinese theatre underwent a great experiment under the cultural revolution. Using the reformed Beijing operas as models, the whole range of theatre arts, from straight plays to acrobatics and from ballet to ballads saw a profound transformation. Alongside the professional theatre, an upsurge of workers’ and peasants’ amateur theatre stimulated new developments.

This book, first published in 1978, sketches the historical background to these changes and offers a factual survey of the main for...