China and the West

Hong, Shen. Yama Chao = Zhao Yanwang. In : Dong fang za zhi ; vol. 20, no 1-2 (1923). = In : Hong Shen xi qu ji. (Shanghai : Xian dai shu ju, 1933). [Geschrieben 1922].
Performance of The Yama Chao = Zhao Yanwang by Hong Shen. Adaptation of The emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill. Hong Shen played the main role.
In the newspaper 'Ching bao' reported that the performance was a failure because the audience couldn't understand it and even regarded the actor as a maniac.
Hong Shen : "Zhao Yanwang is intended to show that society should be held responsible for the sins of the individual. No one in the world is born morally good or bad. Both the good and the bad are products of their environment. Nor is there anyone who is perfectly good or absolutely bad, for human behavior is rather complicates. But why is Zhao like this ? If we can study his life story and the stories of people like him, we will find they might all have suffered seriously from maltreatment and unhappy experiences, especially when they were too young to resist."
"The first scene is somewhat splendid – the language, in particular, is condensed and the dialogues are full of vitality. From the second scene on, he borrows the background and facts from Eugene O'Neill's The emperor Jones, such as circling in the forest, becoming delirious and seeing hallucinations and being chased with people beating the drums, and so on. Apart from the meaning of its subject matter, nothing else in the play is worthy of mention"
Cheng Fu-tsai : Although Hong Shen is fiercely attacked for his imitation of O'Neill's play, his adaptation is undoubtedly a creation of his own rather than a mere mimicry of the American prototype. He has not just incorporated the expressionistic devices into his own play, but has striven to make the play represent and reflect the social and political situation of China in the 1920s. His attempt at externalizing the psychological fear of an escaped convict in modern Chinese drama is unmatched. Thus, the creation of The Yama Chao has achieved a certain degree of success in early modern Chinese drama.
From one of Hong Shen's admissions it ensues that for eight scenes of the drama he utilized the 'background and the facts' from The emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill, and only the first scene, according to him, 'is essential, its style is cohesive and selective, the dialogue is impressive', hence, only this part of the drama is really original.
The Yama Chao borrowed from its American prototype the theme of money, the division of scenes, the use of soliloquies and the psychological treatment of hallucinations in a forest setting. Act three is an adaptation of the forest scenes from The emperor Jones. The Yama Chao follows in scene division, motif, and technical devices.
Hong Shen found O'Neill's symbolic treatment of social and individual ills in The emperor Jones congenial to his own purpose of staging social reform : the predominantly male cast in O'Neill's play attracted Hong Shen.
Hong, Shen : "I am extremely disgusted at the male's impersonating female characters. It is perhaps because I have read too much of Freud's works on abnormal sexuality. Every time I see a man putting on the make-up of a woman, I really feel like having goose-pimples all over me. But I still want to stage a play, and consequently the only thing I can do is to write a play which does not require female characters at all. This is one of the reasons why I made up my mind to borrow the form of Eugene O'Neill's The emperor Jones when the subject-matter of The Yama Chao was decided upon". [In : Zhongguo hua ju yun dong wu shi nian shi liao ji. Tian Han [et al.] zhu. (Beijing : Zhongguo xi ju chu ban she, 1958). 中国话剧运动五十年史料集].