An Anthology of the Twentieth Century Chinese Drama

​​This book collects eleven plays from different periods in the 20th century China, which in its totality reflects the changes and development of modern Chinese drama from its very beginning. The Main Event in Life, a play that Hu Shi wrote in imitation of Ibsen's A Doll's House, is the first Chinese play written in modern vernacular and dealing with the problem of women's freedom. Yama Zhao by Hong Shen and The Night the Tiger Was Captured by Tian Han are representative of the earlier achievements of Chinese playwrights in nationalizing and localizing modern drama in China. Cao Yu, who wrote such well-known plays as Thunderstorm, Sunrise, Wilderness and Peking Man, brought modern Chinese drama to its maturity in the 1930s and 1940s. Under Shanghai Eaves and Teahouse are new and significant fruits of the Chinese realistic drama in the middle of the century. The Red Lantern, however, is one of the revolutionary model plays, which dominated Chinese theatre during the Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Since the 1980s, there have been active experiments and extensive borrowings of Western drama, which resulted in greater diversity in both content and form in contemporary Chinese theatre. The last four plays in the anthology are evidences of that.​