Rey Chow, in her discussion of Chineseness cited above, brings to the fore a concern that has pursued me across my research: what is the nature of the tradition in which I write? Contrary to Chow’s assertion, as a white British male academic, I often find myself feeling paralysed by the baggage of the legacy of the British Empire. Power inequalities make the analysis of any non-Western European culture a seemingly fraught activity, but a retreat from the global towards the analysis of ‘British’ culture in isolation is not only impossible given the on-going effects of globalisation, but such a turn would also deny the legacy of British imperialism, and may even fuel the ideologies that sustained it. Nevertheless, as Chow rightly argues, the construction of Chineseness as an ethnic marker is intimately tied to whiteness, both of which are products of epistemological power. This power was first wielded by the West in the service of narratives of imperialism, but then, more recently, by China itself as a means to conceptualise its rise to global ascendency as the product of an unassailable sinocentric reading of history (Chow, 2002:136). These narratives, Chow concludes, have sought to reify ‘Chinese’ as an ethnic marker – a marker that is increasingly compromised by the growth of Chinese diasporas across the world.Due to the Western imperialism and colonialism of the past few hundred years, sinology as it is pursued in European and American institutions very much, to this day, partakes of the discursive politics of orientalism, a politics that often includes impassioned denials of biased representation by its white practitioners.(Chow, 2002:132)
Yet, does this multiplicity also pertain to whiteness? The influential critique of Orientalism by Edward Said has stressed how Western academic investigations have consistently asserted ‘the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, sceptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter’ (Said, 1977:7). Further, he suggests that Orientalism
Following Said’s logic, will my own endeavours only confirm the political, intellectual, cultural and moral supremacy of Western Europe throughout history, as well as in the contemporary?is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is – and does not simply represent – a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world. (Said, 1977:13)
Said has focussed his work more on the Middle East than on China (Macfie, 2002:122). Christopher Frayling raised this fact with Said in Paris in 1995, and elicited a response for inclusion in his study of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels. Asked for his opinions on the portrayal of China in popular film, Said recalled how he
One is left to wonder upon what evidence Said bases his assertion that stereotypes were unquestioningly accepted? Frayling uses Said’s response as a means to justify a reading of the British public as unerringly critically docile, highlighting the various ways in which British culture has racially stereotyped Chinese ethnicity as negative and criminal. This, he suggests, persists in stories of ‘bugs in computers, poisoned medicines, taints in milk, infected chickens, a plague of spam, gluttony of raw materials, unfair trade surpluses, trespasses on intellectual property, secret purchases of strategic assets, huge arms deals, piracy in Western universities, infiltration of Africa, trouble in Tibet, slave labour, unstable tyranny at home’ (Frayling, 2014:36). The list goes on. It is absolutely not my intention to deny that sinophobia, prejudice and power inequality did not exist historically, and does not still exist in contemporary Britain: far from it. 1 Nor do I seek to deny the legacy of British colonialism and imperialism in China. Nevertheless, critics of Said have highlighted how his thesis rests upon an essentialism of European approaches to globalised encounters from a position of unerring dominance (Macfie, 2002:100). In fact, as this study demonstrates, the construction of Sino-British encounters through an indissoluble power dynamic in which the British self always dominates the Chinese other is simply not borne out by history, even as documented by European writers and scholars – the primary target for critique in Said’s Orientalism. As Dongshin Chang proposes in his analysis of China on the London historical stage, performances ‘did not always confirm, and sometimes even contradicted, the direct correlation between power and representation articulated by the theory of Orientalism’ (Chang, 2015:4). Chang’s focus on both Chinese opera-inspired performance and popular dramas about China staged in London enable him to conclude that ‘imbalanced power dynamics were not unidirectional’ (Chang, 2015:5).didn’t interact with Chinese people. So in a certain way these films also created divisions within the non-European world. But the most powerful thing about them is that they established the norm, which became unquestioning. (Said, cited in Frayling, 2014:10)
I extend Chang’s analysis by focusing on performances of Chinese opera and performances inspired by it, in London, and over a relatively long historical period. By focussing on over 250 years of performance history, this study seeks to explore the wider contexts of Chinese opera performance outside of China. The periods encompassed in one or two chapters of this study have, in the hands of others, been the subject of groundbreaking works analysing the detail of Sino-British encounters. 2 However, I seek to show how Chinese opera, as a performance form in its own right, and as a source for intercultural hybridisation, attends to the multiple complexities of national identity formation and expressions of power through international relations for both Britain and China. This study offers a history of theatre and imperialism, and documents how Chinese opera reflected the rise and fall, and fall and rise, of two empires on different sides of the world. As I seek to show, the performance of Chinese opera on the London stage asserts admiration, contempt, strength and weakness, and thus attends to the complexities of international relations. I will respond to John Mackenzie’s call that ‘the arts of empire and Orientalism require a different approach to their understanding, a clearer periodisation, a closer relationship to event, mood, fashion and changing intellectual context, an effort to comprehend authorial influence and audience reaction, and above all the multiple readings to which they can be subjected’ (Mackenzie, 1995:39).
The expression of multivalent British and Chinese national perspectives through the mounting of performances in London was dependent upon the distinction between Chinese opera and its opera-inspired offshoots. ‘Chinese opera’ is, itself, a contested translation of the Chinese term ‘xiqu’. However, the terms ‘Chinese opera’ and ‘Peking opera’ appear in the majority of the British source material underpinning this study, and are thus used here to reflect the ways in which British critics and audiences understood and engaged with xiqu through the Orientalist lens of Western centrality. 3 As Chow suggests, the ‘collective habit of supplementing every major world trend with the notion of “Chinese” is the result of an over-determined series of historical factors, the most crucial of which is the lingering, pervasive hegemony of Western culture’ (Chow, 2002:134). Yet, despite the homogeneity implied by the term, ‘Chinese opera’ actually consists of many hundreds of regional forms, some of which have ebbed and flowed in and out of the Chinese theatrical consciousness over centuries. However, the Chinese opera that has appeared on the London stage has (with a few notable exceptions in the late 1980s and early 1990s) been a fairly conservative selection from the repertoire of two major genres. Most performances in London have been from the Peking opera (Jingju) repertoire, which came to prominence in Beijing in the mid-eighteenth century. Selections from Kun opera (Kunju) repertoire have also appeared, a form that originated in the sixteenth century and rose to national prominence before entering into decline around the end of the nineteenth century, only to become more popular again towards the end of the twentieth century. For the most part, these performances were given by state-sponsored troupes from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or Taiwan, usually as part of a larger European or world tour. As a consequence, the Chinese opera performances given in London were redolent with the transnational realpolitik of representing Chinese national identity on the international stage.
In contrast, most Chinese opera-inspired theatre was not performed in London by trained Chinese opera actors from East Asia, and took the form of a creative response, usually based upon plays in translation, or newly written plays performed in the style of Chinese opera following the witnessing of performances. These texts were hybrid in nature, combining Chinese and Western theatrical forms, and usually undercutting the musical structures integral to expression in Chinese opera. For the most part, the practitioners involved in these projects were British and had not trained significantly in Chinese theatrical forms. Even in those instances where a Chinese playwright or actor became involved, there remained a great deal of theatrical hybridity in both form and content. The complexities of theatrical representation, usually of white British actors playing Chinese roles in plays written by and for non-Chinese, facilitated a British imperial cultural self-examination.
Homi Bhabha suggests that acts of mimicry become ‘the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power’ (Bhabha, 2004:122). Yet, visualising power is not the same as actually attaining and wielding it. Across this study, I argue that the theatrical relationships between China and Britain, as exposed through the presentation of Chinese opera on the London stage, are of interest precisely because they expose the limits of empire. Mainland China was an informal part of the British Empire, and the theatre as a realm of fantasy was an excellent means of visualising imperial power over China, even when such a vision was at odds with the political reality of Sino-British relations. The presentation and reception of Chinese opera in different modes was, therefore, a discourse of negotiation between Britain and China: it offered a reciprocal means of exploring, defining and belying the limits of influence of Britain over China, and China over Britain. Over the chapters that follow, I seek to explore how Chinese opera and opera-inspired performances asserted both British and Chinese identities and desires on the London stage, and how they were variously manipulated to influence trade, foreign policy and even perceptions of ethnicity.
‘The purpose of playing’, suggests Hamlet to the actors of his dumb show in Act 3, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s play, is ‘to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature’. If theatre is a mirror that reflects the contexts of its creation, the question of who has the cultural agency in a performance becomes central to issues of representing the self and the other, and even the self as other. In other words, the image presented is dependent upon who is holding the mirror. In his study of the actor, writer and director Oscar Asche (1871–1936), Brian Singleton has astutely observed how the depiction of the ‘Orient’ in plays such as Chu Chin Chow (which opened at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1916 to huge critical acclaim) actually spoke more to English sensibilities than might appear:
The normative values of the home country are imprinted on the oriental fiction in order to resolve, to rectify, and to restore justice. This is perpetuated by the oriental characters assuming normative English values by aping the English class system, or by havin...