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The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian
Gao Xingjian is the leading Chinese dramatist of our time. He is also one of the most moving and literary writers for the contemporary stage. His plays have been performed all around the world, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, the Ivory Coast, the United States, France, Germany and other European countries. Born and educated in China, Gao studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute between 1957-1962. After the Cultural Revolution, he became a resident playwright at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. His works, including Bus Stop, Absolute Signal, and Wilderness Man, were trend-setting and have created many controversies and a wave of experimental drama in China. In 1987 he settled in Paris, France and continued to write in Chinese and in French. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1992.
The present collection contains five of Gao Xingjian's most recent works: The Other Shore (1986), Between Life and Death (1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), and Weekend Quartet (1995). One finds poetry, comedy as well as tragedy in the plays, which are graced by beautiful language and original imagery. Combining Zen philosophy and a modern worldview, they serve to illuminate the gritty realities of life, death, sex, loneliness, and exile, all essential concerns in Gao's understanding of the existence of modern man. The plays are also manifestations of the dramatist's idea of the tripartite actor, a process by which the actor neutralizes himself and achieves a disinterested observation of his self in performance.
The present collection contains five of Gao Xingjian's most recent works: The Other Shore (1986), Between Life and Death (1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), and Weekend Quartet (1995). One finds poetry, comedy as well as tragedy in the plays, which are graced by beautiful language and original imagery. Combining Zen philosophy and a modern worldview, they serve to illuminate the gritty realities of life, death, sex, loneliness, and exile, all essential concerns in Gao's understanding of the existence of modern man. The plays are also manifestations of the dramatist's idea of the tripartite actor, a process by which the actor neutralizes himself and achieves a disinterested observation of his self in performance.
312 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 14, 2000
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About the author
Gao Xingjian
101 books385 followersGao Xingjian is a Chinese-born novelist, playwright, critic, and painter. An émigré to France since 1987, Gao was granted French citizenship in 1997. The recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, he is also a noted translator (particularly of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco), screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
October 14, 2022
The following are excerpts from my full review:
Sabina Knight, Review of *The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian*, translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong (The Chinese UP, 1999). *Journal of Asian Studies*, vol. 61 no. 1, pp. 216-18.
https://www.academia.edu/7941540/Revi...
If one constant unites these plays, it would be the wretched loneliness of the characters. Desperate to communicate but shipwrecked in inaction and incomprehension, they struggle to sustain the flow of words, their principal hope for salvation. Yet a latent aggression poisons nearly all their interactions . . . . In mostly unspecified, dreamlike settings, the characters confront fears of bodily and psychic failings, above all death but also impotence, passing love, indifference, impatience and aging. Even as the plays warn of the partiality of self-pity and the perils of estrangement, they are far from endorsing the stance that all action is but “your meaningless resistance against this meaningless world” (186). In performing the characters’ yearning for sympathy, the plays compel a profound moral reflection.
The events of Gao’s life help explain the influence of French existentialism and the theater of the absurd . . . Few works perform as well the hazards of such intense self-involvement for interpersonal relationships.
After playing at the ropes that bind them, the numerous unspecified characters of *The Other Shore* (1986) journey to cross a river to the other shore, a metaphor for the Buddhist land of Enlightenment. When they arrive desolate, amnesiac and mute, a Mnemosyne-like “Woman” restores their speech and memory only to be strangled by the angry crowd, . . .
Even worse solitude plagues the only speaking character in *Between Life and Death* (1991). As she inventories her life memories and the “dating games” after which “what follows is either contraception or litigation” (51), she pleads for some response, but her monologue leaves no opening for the man onstage to talk, and he turns into a piece of clothing on a rack. . . .
Similar isolation and exhaustion motivate *Dialogue and Rebuttal* (1992), as two jaded lovers seek in vain to connect after their one-night stand. . . .
In *Nocturnal Wanderer* (1993), self-incrimination compounds alienation as a train traveler sleepwalks in a nightmare visited by his fellow passengers transformed into Tramp, Prostitute, Ruffian and Thug. . . .
While readers of Chinese will want to appreciate the original plays for their phonic and semantic qualities, the translations succeed in conveying much of the effect of Gao’s inventiveness, particularly the repetitive chanting timbre of the dialogues. These plays are above all performances, and their power comes forth when they are acted aloud by multiple overlapping voices.
Sabina Knight, Review of *The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian*, translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong (The Chinese UP, 1999). *Journal of Asian Studies*, vol. 61 no. 1, pp. 216-18.
https://www.academia.edu/7941540/Revi...
If one constant unites these plays, it would be the wretched loneliness of the characters. Desperate to communicate but shipwrecked in inaction and incomprehension, they struggle to sustain the flow of words, their principal hope for salvation. Yet a latent aggression poisons nearly all their interactions . . . . In mostly unspecified, dreamlike settings, the characters confront fears of bodily and psychic failings, above all death but also impotence, passing love, indifference, impatience and aging. Even as the plays warn of the partiality of self-pity and the perils of estrangement, they are far from endorsing the stance that all action is but “your meaningless resistance against this meaningless world” (186). In performing the characters’ yearning for sympathy, the plays compel a profound moral reflection.
The events of Gao’s life help explain the influence of French existentialism and the theater of the absurd . . . Few works perform as well the hazards of such intense self-involvement for interpersonal relationships.
After playing at the ropes that bind them, the numerous unspecified characters of *The Other Shore* (1986) journey to cross a river to the other shore, a metaphor for the Buddhist land of Enlightenment. When they arrive desolate, amnesiac and mute, a Mnemosyne-like “Woman” restores their speech and memory only to be strangled by the angry crowd, . . .
Even worse solitude plagues the only speaking character in *Between Life and Death* (1991). As she inventories her life memories and the “dating games” after which “what follows is either contraception or litigation” (51), she pleads for some response, but her monologue leaves no opening for the man onstage to talk, and he turns into a piece of clothing on a rack. . . .
Similar isolation and exhaustion motivate *Dialogue and Rebuttal* (1992), as two jaded lovers seek in vain to connect after their one-night stand. . . .
In *Nocturnal Wanderer* (1993), self-incrimination compounds alienation as a train traveler sleepwalks in a nightmare visited by his fellow passengers transformed into Tramp, Prostitute, Ruffian and Thug. . . .
While readers of Chinese will want to appreciate the original plays for their phonic and semantic qualities, the translations succeed in conveying much of the effect of Gao’s inventiveness, particularly the repetitive chanting timbre of the dialogues. These plays are above all performances, and their power comes forth when they are acted aloud by multiple overlapping voices.
October 21, 2020
The Other Shore is a collection of plays by the first Chinese Nobel Prize Laureate Gao Xingjian, translated and with an introduction by Gilbert C. F. Fong. The Other Shore is the first play in this collection, and I have not read the other plays yet. This work is a selection on my 2020 Reading Challenge list. {SPOILER ALERT} As always, my comments have some spoilers.
1. I rated this with 4 stars out of 5, but leaning toward 5 out of 5. I have never read his work before, so I was interested to see how a writer from the post-World War II generation in China, who barely survived Mao’s “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Movement” and barely escaped confinement in a labor camp to “receive training”, could yet find his artistic voice and become a powerful influence for change in the theater. The answer to that is his coterie of artistic friends, both in China and abroad, who saw his brilliant concepts of both the actors in performance and the audience in how he developed a new art form for the drama itself. It seems a complicated dynamic, but is really not, as I will explain.
2. Fong’s introduction provides a brief history of his life in China and how he eventually had to escape. I will not dwell upon it, but I urge readers to read it carefully, in order to see how Xingjian’s dramaturgy evolved from the Communist-approved social realism to a kind of “happening” confluence of factors devoted to developing the actors in the process of their performance. Even though Xingjian has been long separated from the Communist Chinese influences of his youth, I see his devotion to the best didactic impulses of his plays as the motive he learned early in his life.
3. For readers baffled by what is happening in this play, I recommend that they skip to the end of the play for the short set of directions called “Some Suggestions on Producing The Other Shore.” These notes are a kind of manual for the production of the play with special attention to the actors and how they use language, both verbally and in body language. I will extract a couple of paragraphs so that readers can see what Xingjian’s goal is. Here is paragraph 2: “An ideal performance should be a unity of somatics, language, and psychology. Our play is an attempt to pursue this unified artistic expression and to assist the actors to achieve this goal. In other words, we should allow the actors the chance for linguistic expression in their search for suitable somatic movements, so that language and somatics are able to evoke psychological process at the same time. For this reason, during rehearsals and actual performances, it is not advisable to separate dialogue from movement, i.e., to memorize only the dialogue, to do reading as in common practice, or to strip the language and transform the play into a mime. Certain scenes in the play do not feature dialogue, but there are still other aural expressions, which could be regarded asa kind of sound language.”
4. The nature of Xingjian’s dramatic ideas is fascinating to me. I was initially repelled by what I thought was his simple collection of random elements of scenes with many different characters. It seemed to be an almost dream-like succession of memories from different dreamers, all in a very absurd and random progression without plot, character development, or any other line of thought. I thought I might need to draw upon my interest in the Theater of the Absurd to help me, because there was no other body of work that seemed to support this kind of drama. I considered using this approach especially because I knew Xingjian had a significant history with French theater, so I had reason to look for such a comparison in things like Sartre’s “No Exit” or Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Of course, the Theater of the Absurd does not “own” its rejection of realism or its stark placement of its characters into bewilderment and anxiety in the face of an inexplicable universe. Absurdist elements occupy many other works and time periods, such as much of Aristophanes, works in the late classical period by Lucian, Petronius, and Apuleius, the morality plays of the Middle Ages, Strindberg’s plays, the dream novels of Kafka and Joyce, and even silent films or the verbal nonsense in the early sound films of Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers. In many of these early instances, it was common to depict everyman-type characters dealing with allegorical and even existential problems. For example, Laurel and Hardy’s effort to haul a piano up the stairs is both hysterically ridiculous and also a major existential threat. In many other cases, artists intended to do away with art as a mere imitation of surface reality, demanding instead that it should be more real than reality and deal with essences rather than appearances. Archetype, allegory, myth, magic, and exposure to the deepest conflicts within the human mind were all fair game now.
5. But having restated all this background, can we say that a variant of the Theater of the Absurd is really what Xingjian aims to do here? It is true that he presents to us a baffling array of different scenes, some but not all of which have the same characters. The one compelling theme, if there is one, is “the other shore,” which is an allegory for either life after death or heaven or something which gives the characters a release from the intricate social contracts into which they are embedded. They know only that it may exist on the other side of a real or imaginary river and that no one has apparently returned from any attempt to get to the other shore. So the effort is fraught with uncertainty, yet it attracts enough people to keep the motivations going in the play. I will quote here Paragraph 3 from his directions called “Some Suggestions on Producing The Other Shore.” I think you will see that he emphatically rejects the didactic aims of the Theater of the Absurd: “Even though our play is abstract, the performance should not aim at conceptualization in the stark fashion of the play of ideas. Our aspiration is to achieve a kind of emotive abstraction through performance, i.e., a non-philosophical abstraction. The play seeks to set up the performance on the premise of non-reality, and to fully mobilize the imagination of the actors before evoking abstraction through emotion. Therefore the performance requires not only the unity of language and somatics but also the unity of thought and philosophy.” I take this to mean mainly that he has created a rich “stew” of images, ideas, desires, motives, and actions to excite the unique creative perspectives of both the actors and the audience, and that “stew” can create a unique emotive abstraction from scene to scene.
6. There is another obvious theme or sub-theme that dominates many of these random scenes. That is the power of anyone in authority to provoke images of power and domination. Some scenes even have a dominating force which evokes fear, anger, and hatred in the crowd, causing the crowd to chase or abuse a sympathetic figure. For example, the Card Player becomes an authority figure simply from inviting people to play his game in hopes of winning a sip of his wine. He holds the only trump card, hence he cannot lose any trick against another player. Worst of all, the Card Player invents a way to identify all the losers of the card game by sticking small pieces of paper upon their faces. And that factor of the Card Player’s authority is irrelevant as soon as Man hesitates to identify the card that he himself saw, and before long it becomes a metaphysical discussion of the nature of truth. Crowds are not the ideal venue for philosophical discussions, so the crowd soon tears away at the Man and he collapses. The one statement remaining after this fiasco is the Man’s question, “But why can’t we have “should be”?
7. The concluding scene is primarily between Man and the Shadow, which eventually transforms into his drooping, blind, and feeble old heart. The Shadow sums up the Man’s life in these words to him: “You have long lost your faith in people, your heart has grown old and it will not love again. Your only wish is to go walking among the trees in the forest until you are totally exhausted. Then you will collapse somewhere, hoping never to be found…..In fact it is nothing more than a kind of self-pity. You are unwilling to end like this, you are so vain.” And then, after a brief intercession with the trees in the forest which are monsters derived from the crowd in the play, the Shadow/heart takes the Man away.
8. I cannot emphasize enough that this play is really a teaching guide for actors to hone their abilities in the kind of drama Xingjian has invented. So I recommend against writing it off as just experimental and nothing more. To quote Xingjian from paragraph 7 of his Notes: “The play demands that the actors abandon completely the kind of performance dependent upon logic and semantic thinking. The liveliest performances are exactly those which are intuitive, improvisational, and on the spur of the moment. On the stage as in real life, the actor sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, and captures his partners’ reactions with his free-moving body. In other words, a performance can only be lively without the use of intellect. Therefore it is best not to resort to literary analysis outside of theatrical performance or to uncover hidden meanings in the text in performing the play."
1. I rated this with 4 stars out of 5, but leaning toward 5 out of 5. I have never read his work before, so I was interested to see how a writer from the post-World War II generation in China, who barely survived Mao’s “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Movement” and barely escaped confinement in a labor camp to “receive training”, could yet find his artistic voice and become a powerful influence for change in the theater. The answer to that is his coterie of artistic friends, both in China and abroad, who saw his brilliant concepts of both the actors in performance and the audience in how he developed a new art form for the drama itself. It seems a complicated dynamic, but is really not, as I will explain.
2. Fong’s introduction provides a brief history of his life in China and how he eventually had to escape. I will not dwell upon it, but I urge readers to read it carefully, in order to see how Xingjian’s dramaturgy evolved from the Communist-approved social realism to a kind of “happening” confluence of factors devoted to developing the actors in the process of their performance. Even though Xingjian has been long separated from the Communist Chinese influences of his youth, I see his devotion to the best didactic impulses of his plays as the motive he learned early in his life.
3. For readers baffled by what is happening in this play, I recommend that they skip to the end of the play for the short set of directions called “Some Suggestions on Producing The Other Shore.” These notes are a kind of manual for the production of the play with special attention to the actors and how they use language, both verbally and in body language. I will extract a couple of paragraphs so that readers can see what Xingjian’s goal is. Here is paragraph 2: “An ideal performance should be a unity of somatics, language, and psychology. Our play is an attempt to pursue this unified artistic expression and to assist the actors to achieve this goal. In other words, we should allow the actors the chance for linguistic expression in their search for suitable somatic movements, so that language and somatics are able to evoke psychological process at the same time. For this reason, during rehearsals and actual performances, it is not advisable to separate dialogue from movement, i.e., to memorize only the dialogue, to do reading as in common practice, or to strip the language and transform the play into a mime. Certain scenes in the play do not feature dialogue, but there are still other aural expressions, which could be regarded asa kind of sound language.”
4. The nature of Xingjian’s dramatic ideas is fascinating to me. I was initially repelled by what I thought was his simple collection of random elements of scenes with many different characters. It seemed to be an almost dream-like succession of memories from different dreamers, all in a very absurd and random progression without plot, character development, or any other line of thought. I thought I might need to draw upon my interest in the Theater of the Absurd to help me, because there was no other body of work that seemed to support this kind of drama. I considered using this approach especially because I knew Xingjian had a significant history with French theater, so I had reason to look for such a comparison in things like Sartre’s “No Exit” or Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Of course, the Theater of the Absurd does not “own” its rejection of realism or its stark placement of its characters into bewilderment and anxiety in the face of an inexplicable universe. Absurdist elements occupy many other works and time periods, such as much of Aristophanes, works in the late classical period by Lucian, Petronius, and Apuleius, the morality plays of the Middle Ages, Strindberg’s plays, the dream novels of Kafka and Joyce, and even silent films or the verbal nonsense in the early sound films of Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers. In many of these early instances, it was common to depict everyman-type characters dealing with allegorical and even existential problems. For example, Laurel and Hardy’s effort to haul a piano up the stairs is both hysterically ridiculous and also a major existential threat. In many other cases, artists intended to do away with art as a mere imitation of surface reality, demanding instead that it should be more real than reality and deal with essences rather than appearances. Archetype, allegory, myth, magic, and exposure to the deepest conflicts within the human mind were all fair game now.
5. But having restated all this background, can we say that a variant of the Theater of the Absurd is really what Xingjian aims to do here? It is true that he presents to us a baffling array of different scenes, some but not all of which have the same characters. The one compelling theme, if there is one, is “the other shore,” which is an allegory for either life after death or heaven or something which gives the characters a release from the intricate social contracts into which they are embedded. They know only that it may exist on the other side of a real or imaginary river and that no one has apparently returned from any attempt to get to the other shore. So the effort is fraught with uncertainty, yet it attracts enough people to keep the motivations going in the play. I will quote here Paragraph 3 from his directions called “Some Suggestions on Producing The Other Shore.” I think you will see that he emphatically rejects the didactic aims of the Theater of the Absurd: “Even though our play is abstract, the performance should not aim at conceptualization in the stark fashion of the play of ideas. Our aspiration is to achieve a kind of emotive abstraction through performance, i.e., a non-philosophical abstraction. The play seeks to set up the performance on the premise of non-reality, and to fully mobilize the imagination of the actors before evoking abstraction through emotion. Therefore the performance requires not only the unity of language and somatics but also the unity of thought and philosophy.” I take this to mean mainly that he has created a rich “stew” of images, ideas, desires, motives, and actions to excite the unique creative perspectives of both the actors and the audience, and that “stew” can create a unique emotive abstraction from scene to scene.
6. There is another obvious theme or sub-theme that dominates many of these random scenes. That is the power of anyone in authority to provoke images of power and domination. Some scenes even have a dominating force which evokes fear, anger, and hatred in the crowd, causing the crowd to chase or abuse a sympathetic figure. For example, the Card Player becomes an authority figure simply from inviting people to play his game in hopes of winning a sip of his wine. He holds the only trump card, hence he cannot lose any trick against another player. Worst of all, the Card Player invents a way to identify all the losers of the card game by sticking small pieces of paper upon their faces. And that factor of the Card Player’s authority is irrelevant as soon as Man hesitates to identify the card that he himself saw, and before long it becomes a metaphysical discussion of the nature of truth. Crowds are not the ideal venue for philosophical discussions, so the crowd soon tears away at the Man and he collapses. The one statement remaining after this fiasco is the Man’s question, “But why can’t we have “should be”?
7. The concluding scene is primarily between Man and the Shadow, which eventually transforms into his drooping, blind, and feeble old heart. The Shadow sums up the Man’s life in these words to him: “You have long lost your faith in people, your heart has grown old and it will not love again. Your only wish is to go walking among the trees in the forest until you are totally exhausted. Then you will collapse somewhere, hoping never to be found…..In fact it is nothing more than a kind of self-pity. You are unwilling to end like this, you are so vain.” And then, after a brief intercession with the trees in the forest which are monsters derived from the crowd in the play, the Shadow/heart takes the Man away.
8. I cannot emphasize enough that this play is really a teaching guide for actors to hone their abilities in the kind of drama Xingjian has invented. So I recommend against writing it off as just experimental and nothing more. To quote Xingjian from paragraph 7 of his Notes: “The play demands that the actors abandon completely the kind of performance dependent upon logic and semantic thinking. The liveliest performances are exactly those which are intuitive, improvisational, and on the spur of the moment. On the stage as in real life, the actor sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, and captures his partners’ reactions with his free-moving body. In other words, a performance can only be lively without the use of intellect. Therefore it is best not to resort to literary analysis outside of theatrical performance or to uncover hidden meanings in the text in performing the play."
November 27, 2019
I have to admit this book of plays is way to avant-garde for my tastes. I've read a couple of his novels("Soul Mountain" and "Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather") and enjoyed them very much but not this. The first play "The Other Shore" is quite abstract and written like a free verse poem, the second play "Between Life and Death" has only one character, Woman, who appears to be interacting with herself, the third play "Dialogue and Rebuttal" has two characters, a middle aged man and a young girl, who after sex engage in dialogue and mysteriously murder each other but then continue in their dialogue, the fourth play "Nocturnal Wanderer" has multiple characters in which a prostitute is killed and the final play "Weekend Quartet" I didn't read.
January 16, 2024
3.5
Gao Xingjian : nie należy analizować tej sztuki
Co usłyszeli wszyscy: trzeba napisać doszczętną analizę
Gao Xingjian : nie należy analizować tej sztuki
Co usłyszeli wszyscy: trzeba napisać doszczętną analizę
October 9, 2025
The plays in this volume where interesting and definitely not bad, but they were all middle of the road for their genre and didn't change my mind that Gao is an underwhelming choice for the Nobel. If my seventeen year old son had written these plays I would be very proud, would find him exceptionally talented, and would have encouraged him to continue writing. I would be impressed that he's emulating Samuel Beckett rather than playing Fortnite but would advise him to try and find his own voice.
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November 13, 2024For THE 198 — just read the titular work.
So like we all know I'm not an abstract girlie.
I am very sure that there have been incredible productions of this play but for every one of those I'm sure there have been 10 incredibly shitty college productions.
So like we all know I'm not an abstract girlie.
I am very sure that there have been incredible productions of this play but for every one of those I'm sure there have been 10 incredibly shitty college productions.
March 11, 2020
Very abstract plays - not absurdist.
As one character (only named as one of the actors) says in the antepenultimate line: "It's so bad, what kind of stupid play is this anyway?"
As one character (only named as one of the actors) says in the antepenultimate line: "It's so bad, what kind of stupid play is this anyway?"
March 1, 2023
lowkey i very much loved this.
read it for survey <3
read it for survey <3
January 28, 2026
so good!!! obsessed!!!
July 26, 2020
The Other Shore: 3/10
Between Life and Death: 9/10 (intriguing in a horrific kind of way)
Dialogue and Rebuttal: 5/10
Nocturnal Wanderer: 6/10
Weekend Quartet: 3/10
Not a bad read at all, but these are definitely very avant-garde and difficult to understand at times. I think I may stick with Gao's novels.
Between Life and Death: 9/10 (intriguing in a horrific kind of way)
Dialogue and Rebuttal: 5/10
Nocturnal Wanderer: 6/10
Weekend Quartet: 3/10
Not a bad read at all, but these are definitely very avant-garde and difficult to understand at times. I think I may stick with Gao's novels.
May 3, 2016
A combination of the physical and verbal, the somatic and the spoken word. It is a performance of the individual, of the collective, and of the relationships between people and their environments. There is an improvisation and intuition inherent to this performance that lives beyond “logic and semantic thinking”; “it is best”, says Xingjian, “not to resort to library analysis outside of theatrical performance or to uncover hidden meanings in the text”.
"The play can be performed in a theatre, a living room, a rehearsal room, an empty warehouse…any empty space as long as the necessary lighting and sound equipment can be properly installed…The actors may be among the audience, or the audience among the actors.”
Like Godot, in many ways, yet achieved through very different means.
I don't understand it, that's for sure. As usual, rating arbitrary. It probably needs to be seen, not read.
Metatheater, relationships, abstraction, realization, searching, meaning, acting, dreamlike qualities, episodic, conformity/individual/collectivism, etc.
"The play can be performed in a theatre, a living room, a rehearsal room, an empty warehouse…any empty space as long as the necessary lighting and sound equipment can be properly installed…The actors may be among the audience, or the audience among the actors.”
Like Godot, in many ways, yet achieved through very different means.
I don't understand it, that's for sure. As usual, rating arbitrary. It probably needs to be seen, not read.
Metatheater, relationships, abstraction, realization, searching, meaning, acting, dreamlike qualities, episodic, conformity/individual/collectivism, etc.
May 31, 2007
The Other Shore by Gao Xingjian, translated by Gilbet C. F. Fong
A great intro collection to the Chinese ex-pat, nobel prize winning playwright. I enjoyed the work and found it to be very much in line with what my own personal vision of the theater is. Gao Xingjian uses sophisticated dialogue and effectively combines it with abstract movement sequences, music and other performative elements. I liked the play, Nocturnal Wanderer so much that I’m directing it in my companies Unseen/Unheard Reading Series this December. The premise of this jewel. While characters on a train sleep, in the city a sleepwalker blindly encounters a prostitute, a thug, a tramp and other characters with very little control over his own life course while trains pass by on tracks overhead. A brilliant reflection of our lives.
A great intro collection to the Chinese ex-pat, nobel prize winning playwright. I enjoyed the work and found it to be very much in line with what my own personal vision of the theater is. Gao Xingjian uses sophisticated dialogue and effectively combines it with abstract movement sequences, music and other performative elements. I liked the play, Nocturnal Wanderer so much that I’m directing it in my companies Unseen/Unheard Reading Series this December. The premise of this jewel. While characters on a train sleep, in the city a sleepwalker blindly encounters a prostitute, a thug, a tramp and other characters with very little control over his own life course while trains pass by on tracks overhead. A brilliant reflection of our lives.
January 18, 2016
"The shift in narrative mode is not a mere substitution of 'I' by 'you,' 'he or 'she'; it also has implications for the actor and the audience's point of view." The introduction to Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian's five plays helps the reader understand Gao's use of language in these strange, surreal plays. Each play involves the "exploration of the self." In one of my favorites, "Weekend Quartet," the character exclaims "You must prove that you haven't grown old, you don't want to admit that death is creeping up to you step by step. You have to scream once more, feel once more, and then scream yet one more time, you're not going to allow them to close that dark and secret door behind you once and forever." Gao’s plays eloquently expose the angst and depth of our inner being.
December 4, 2012
I did not care for reading this play, though I accept I may have a very different experience if I ever see it. Which I admit is extremely unlikely. It’s Brechtian, absurdist, but it does have some nice monologues. But a Nobel prize? There are more plays in this collection, but this one was plenty, thank you.
February 4, 2009
This is one of the best pieces of modern dramatic literature that I have ever read. I could read it over and over and find something new every single time.
August 31, 2009
I foolishly attempted to mount a production of this with my high school drama class. Such a monumental work.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews