City of the Dead and Song of the Night

In the early 1980s Gao Xingjian 高行健 established himself quickly as one of the most innovative critics and playwrights of the People’s Republic of China. Because he soon attracted the attention of the authorities, he has been living abroad since 1987, where he has continued to write and publish both in French and in Chinese. His fiction and drama earned him the Nobel Prize in 2000, the first time this prestigious distinction was awarded to a Chinese author. His fiction has been rendered in numerous languages and his plays have been performed on many occasions. Gilbert C. F. Fong and Mabel Lee both have established a solid record as English translators of Gao Xingjian, and this slim volume, presenting two plays in fluent translations, is yet another welcome addition to their earlier work introducing Gao to Western audiences. Gao produced the first draft of City of the Dead (Mingcheng冥城) in 1987, only a few months before he left the PRC, then revised the text in Paris in 1990, and produced a final version in 1991. The translation in this volume is by Gilbert Fong. Song of the Night (Yeyoushen 夜遊神) was first drafted in French in 1999, and revised in 2007. That second French version served as the basis of an English translation by Claire Conceison that was published in 2010. Mabel Lee’s translation here is based on Gao Xingjian’s Chinese version of 2009, which was first published in 2014. Song of the Night is a very simple play: it only features one female actor who speaks, but she is accompanied on stage by two female dancers and a male musician. City of the Dead, in contrast, requires a large cast and incorporates many elements of traditional Chinese drama; the stage directions are so demanding that its stageability was seriously questioned (apart from an earlier version as dance drama performed in Hong Kong in 1988, it was first performed on the basis of the present text in Korean translation in Seoul in 2011). The introduction to this volume, titled “Gao Xingjian: Autobiography and the Portrayal of the Female Psyche,” is signed by Mabel Lee. In it she treats both of these two plays by Gao Xingjian as reflections of his lifelong obsession with the relation between men and women. In City of the Dead the wife of the ancient philosopher Zhuangzi is portrayed as the victim of brutal patriarchy in this world and the next, as well as of