Eric's Beijing Diary

I took Chanel to see "A Doll's House" this evening. The drama community in Beijing is having an "Ibsen" festival, and this is probably the most well known of Ibsen's plays. Very interesting adaptation. They had rewritten the play to adapt it to China. The leading actress was from Norway (the write-up in the paper called her "Netherlandish" :), but the rest of the cast was Chinese. I was very impressed by the acting, but the play was a bit odd and confusing, because in rewriting the play to adapt it to China, they had left the Norwegian names. It took me awhile to figure out that they must be doing that to help people identify the key characters from the play (assuming they were familiar with it) even though it did not really make sense for Chinese characters in a Chinese context to have Norwegian names.

I had never been to the Oriental Pioneer Theater before. I like it, though, because it was very easy to get a seat right near the stage. The stage is small and simple; it reminded me of the old Pentacle Theater in West Salem (Oregon), except that it was not theater in the round. The quality of production, though, is good here. Not being familiar with theater in China, I can't say anything about the actors, but Chanel recognized several of them.

The play as they had adapted it, addressed the problems faced by a western woman who marries a Chinese man and has to adapt to Chinese society. So the focus is on "culture shock." Ibsen's original was about culture shock, too, but it was not about the conflict between Western and Chinese cultural values, but about the conflict between men and women. Ibsen's point is that men want women to be women, but they often treat them like men. The unique nature of this adaptation actually created an interesting problem, because one was forced to wonder whether a given conflict resulted from differing cultural perspectives, or just from the different ways that men and women look at things.