Cao Yu's plays

Author: Cao Yu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-05-01
Features: Many literary masters, when recalling their childhood, have generally said that they never dreamed of becoming something when they grew up. Cao Yu was no exception. He said he never thought of becoming a playwright as a child and only wanted to be a teacher when he was studying. His lifelong hope was to become a university professor and study some knowledge. So, how did he end up choosing the "road of theater"?
At the age of seven or eight, his mother took him to watch plays. At that time, there were only "civilized plays" or "new plays." Besides that, he also watched a lot of Peking Opera, Hebei, Ping Opera, etc., and listened to many Peking Opera, Tianjin folk tunes, Henan dizi, and so on. He loved watching Peking Opera and even played in the Peking Opera "Snow Mountain Journey," receiving praise for his performance and his musical sense. But what truly nourished him deeply was Chinese classical literature—works like the Zuo Zhuan, the Chuci, the Four Books, the Five Classics, the Records of the Grand Historian, the Book of Han, Tang and Song poetry, Yuan Dynasty zaju, and Ming and Qing novels.
At the age of fourteen, Cao Yu entered Tianjin Nankai Middle School and joined the Nankai New Drama Troupe, performing in many plays and already showing his unique talent in drama. It can be said that Cao Yu's life in theater began at this time. He started to adapt foreign plays, such as Molière's The Miser, into The Money Mad, and transformed Galsworthy's play Struggle into The Strong-Willed. On one hand, he adapted scripts and wrote plays, while on the other hand, he performed in them. The play he participated in performing was Oppression by Li Xiling. He also starred as the female lead, Nora, in the famous play A Doll's House by Ibsen under the direction of Teacher Zhang Pengchun. Naturally, he was well-versed in both stage and theatrical knowledge. During his time from middle school to studying at Tsinghua University's Western Literature Department, he read hundreds of foreign scripts. Perhaps precisely because of this, when writing scripts, in addition to considering stage directions, he always insisted, "My scripts are always intended for readers to read."