Faust made in China: Meng Jinghui and Shen Lin’s irreverent socio-cultural deconstruction of Goethe’s iconic masterpiece

摘要

China’s unparalleled economic rise in the past 30 years and the blistering social transformation associated with it has generated immense interest globally in China as a nation. Regrettably, Western interest is still extremely narrow and restricted to statistical economic data and the belief that social change in China and modernisation is driven exclusively by the forces of globalisation, that is, economic forces, is widespread and little attention is given outside of specialist circles to the new robust intellectual and artistic-creative energies underlying China’s transformation and self-invention since 1978, identified by Deng Xiaoping as absolutely essential for China’s modernisation program. Bootleg Faust (Daoban Fushide, written by Shen Lin of the Central Academy of Drama, 1999), the ambitious staging of the translation-adaptation-deconstruction of the German classic by Meng Jinghui, China’s leading experimental theatre director on January 1, 2000 to welcome the New Millennium (and to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth) is a remarkable artistic achievement. The very fact that Goethe’s Faust One and Two, completed in 1832, and rarely performed in its totality in German-speaking countries, can be staged in Chinese adaptation for weeks, and to full houses in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese provincial centres and overseas is proof that the Luhanite vision of a global village is no longer virtual, but real, just as real as Meng Jinghui and Shen Lin’s theatrical professionalism and genius to give Goethe’s signature work relevance in twenty-first century China. Some of the salient aspects of this theatrical achievement and the socio-cultural significance of Meng and Shen’s irreverent artistic endeavour of deconstructing Goethe’s Faust will be explored in this paper.