China’s Theatrical Revolution and the Most Consequential Scandal in Theatre History

In 1961, a play by the historian Wu Han, about an episode in the life of Hai Rui, an official who lived in the sixteenth century Ming Dynasty, was produced in Beijing. The play was said to be a thinly disguised attack on Chairman Mao Zedong. The furor ignited by these rumours led not only to the closure of the production and the punishment of the author and leading actor, but to a full decade of terror causing the deaths of an estimated 20 million people and the ruination of many millions of other lives, events from which China has yet to recover. That has been the most widely accepted account of the matter in both China and the West for over fifty years. This is rightly regarded as the most infamous episode in theatre history and is plainly not redeemed by the way it also led to the creation of a new theatrical genre. But is it possible that the initial accusations against Wu Han’s play had been entirely concocted for malicious reasons? An apt story for our own age of conspiracy theories and mob retribution.

Craig Walker is Professor of Drama and was the inaugural Director of the DAN School of Drama and Music until 2022.  He holds an M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in Drama from the University of Toronto and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.  His academic publications include The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition, The Broadview Anthology of Drama and the Broadview Press edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear. He has also worked extensively in the Canadian theatre as a director and actor.  His writing for the stage includes These Deeds, Chantecler: A Musical, Finnegans Wake: A Dream Play, based on the novel by James Joyce, and, in collaboration with composer John Burge, One Last Night with Mata Hari.