Ashley Thorpe

Ashley.thorpe@rhul.ac.uk

After thought: archiving absence through a practice-as-

research production of Xiong Shiyi’s Lady Precious Stream

(1934)

Abstract

Lady Precious Stream is the most globally successful

Chinese play in history, written by the Chinese émigré

Xiong Shiyi (1902-1992). This English translation of a

Chinese xiqu (traditional drama) play premiered in

London’s West End in 1934, and was an instant critical

and commercial triumph. Drawing upon archival sources,

the play was directed by the author as a practice-as-

research project in 2011 to investigate how Chinese drama

aesthetics might have been used in the original

production. The full extent of Xiong’s intercultural

hybridity can only be comprehended in performance. The

article offers a reflexive comment on the archiving of

practice-as-research. It proposes that the

acknowledgement of absence in archival material opens up

a space where the subjective nature of interpretation can

be interrogated. This absence is expressed through

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different media and across different temporalities: in

the process of creating the archive of the original

performance, in the mining of that archive for resources

to inform contemporary practice, and in the subsequent

archiving of contemporary practice in articles such as

this.

AFTERTHOUGHT

An Explanatory Postscript to ‘The Professor from

Peking’ stating the author’s reason for writing

Chinese plays in the English language and giving a

brief account of the past thirty years’ happenings

in that remote country known as China.

‘Of words from mouth not surrounded by hair,

Everybody must beware!’

[…]

A writer with a smooth chin has a very slender

chance in England. Pitiable indeed was my lot when I

first came from China and wrote Lady Precious Stream

in English. Those who had read the manuscript first

would no longer believe in the play the moment they

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met me, and those who met me first seldom cared to

read the manuscript (Hsiung 1939:163-64).

In spite of the overt racism encountered by the author,

as documented in the above autobiographical account

published in 1939, Xiong Shiyi’si (1902-1992) Lady

Precious Stream has become, without doubt, the most

globally successful Chinese play – in any dialect – in

history. This four act spoken drama adaptation and

translation of the xiqu (traditional Chinese drama) play

Hong Zong Lie Ma (The Steed with the Red Mane) became a

box office sensation in London’s West End upon its

opening in 1934. It ran for 733 successive performances

over two years. It was also produced by Morris Guest in

New York in 1935 at the Booth Theatre where it ran for

more than 200 performances. It subsequently toured across

the US with a second season in the mid-west and east, and

a third season down the east coast. This English language

text was also staged in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hong Kong

in the mid-1930s. It was revived in London in 1939, 1943,

1944, 1947, and 1950. In 1958, Penguin Books republished

the text in a compendium of works considered suitable for

casts of young actors. Thereafter, amateur and youth

groups performed Lady Precious Stream for decades. It was

also translated by others into numerous European

languages, and was staged in the Netherlands,

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Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in the 1930s (Hsiung

1939:176), whilst Xiong himself re-translated the play

into Chinese in 1956 for publication in Hong Kong (Xiong

1956:3).

Although the play occupies an important place in the

history of the internationalization of Chinese drama, it

also signalled a turning point in representations of

Chinese drama on the British and American stages, albeit

ambivalently. The performance of Lady Precious Stream

was, in many ways, entirely consistent with the

prevailing modes of theatrical representation. Like its

predecessors, Lady Precious Stream used yellowface

techniques to make the all-White British and American

casts read as ethnically Chinese. As a consequence, the

performance can be classified as a piece of fantasy

chinoiserie that enabled British audiences to steep

themselves in Chinese exoticism. It also maintained, as

Diana Yeh suggests, "the colonial and racial order by

excising, not only from modernism, but also from

modernity, the Chinese" (Yeh 2015:195). Yet, while Yeh’s

reading is valid, I consider it to be a limited one.

Xiong’s writing, and his own personal appearance on stage

each evening as the Honourable Reader (introducing each

act with witty repartee), purposefully ruptured the

authenticity of yellowface and exposed it as a

construction. His regular appearance on stage enabled

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Xiong to claim authorial ownership of the work to each

audience. Although his presence remained tied to a

performance that was construed as exotic, that he was

present at all was a significant shift in authorial

representation in the British theatrical landscape of the

time. The effect of Xiong being in attendance was to

highlight how the representations of Chinese drama that

had come before, specifically The Yellow Jacket (1912,

British premiere 1913), and The Circle of Chalk (1929),

were the products of Anglo-American White imaginings. As

a consequence, Lady Precious Stream engaged with the

politics of representation, but in a veiled way that both

supported and shifted existing British theatrical

representations of China. In this regard, Xiong’s play

stands as a record of the negotiations that were

necessary for a Chinese playwright to stage his work in

London in the 1930s. Yet, as the corollary of this, I

also suggest that Xiong did assert Chinese modernity in

the context of British imperial and colonial supremacy

over China.

The ways in which Xiong achieved this became clear

only upon staging the play. Through the process of

directing, I came to realize how the play in performance

is more engaged with intercultural dialogue than is

indicated in the text. Indeed, upon first reading, Lady

Precious Stream is easy to dismiss as an imagining of

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xiqu in the Said Orientalist tradition; a fantasy

imagining that is devoid of the musical complexity that

structures xiqu’s many forms. My own staging of the play,

however, has revealed how Lady Precious Stream was an

interculturally hybridic performance, particularly in

terms of mise-en-scéne. My staging carefully and

thoughtfully adapted xiqu aesthetics for a non-Chinese

audience. Previously, the performance text of Lady

Precious Stream was subordinated to the literary text.

Consequently, this article seeks to explore two

distinct, but intertwined, strands to highlight the

intercultural aspects of the production. The first

engages with the archival material concerning the

performance of Lady Precious Stream during its opening

run in London in 1934. I identify absences in the

archive, and explain how this led me to stage the play as

a practice-as-research project in 2011. The second strand

reflexively analyses my own method of archiving, as I

document the decision-making process behind my 2011

staging of the play. Readers will note a lapse of several

years since my staging of the performance in 2011 and the

publication of its outcomes in written form. This derives

partly from the fact that other research projects

demanded my time, but also that reviewing the performance

after a hiatus facilitated new, posthumous, connections

between decision and outcome.

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The lapse between performance and writing, however,

raises methodological questions that ought to be

addressed. After having expended a considerable amount of

time and effort upon staging an archive as practice-as-

research, the time came when I finally felt ready to

construct my own one. I am, as Jacques Derrida suggests,

“en mal d’archive: in need of archives”, wherein mal

which usually means to suffer from a sickness, to

trouble, indicates here to search passionately “for the

archive right where it slips away” (Derrida 1995:91).

Yet, given that archives are “at once institutive and

conservative” (Derrida 1995:7), how do I document the

instability of my own decision-making processes through

the fixity of writing this archive? What goes in? What

gets edited out? What has been forgotten? Is there any

correlation between writing this article-as-archive of a

practice-as-research performance, and the act of mining

the archive for research on the original production?

In writing this piece, I have discerned a

methodological correlation between what I have undertaken

as practice, and what you are doing as reader. As you

read the trace of my own presence at a computer, and

attempt to re-construct the staging of a performance at

which you were almost certainly not present (and even if

you were, you are now in a state of absence; that is, as

remembered history), I propose that you reflexively enter

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into the very same process of subjective archival

investigation that produced my own staging of Lady

Precious Stream in 2011. As a reader, you too are en mal

d’archive.

In turn, the time lapse between staging and then

writing the archive suggests to me that reflexivity

affords visibility to archival absence. In turn, this

reflexivity has enabled me to creatively contemplate how

a text might weave together different cultural practices

to create a polysemic intercultural performance. How

might a production unpack, thread together, and become

entangled in this interweaving? How do I navigate between

my own responses to the material and the archival history

I confront? How do I do all of these things when they are

not really “there”? This article-as-archive seeks to

reflexively engage with the above by discussing the

process of researching and then staging Lady Precious

Stream.

Archival absence: tracing the performance of Lady

Precious Stream (1934)

Lady Precious Stream centres on the daughter of Prime

Minister Wang Yun, Precious Stream, who marries the

gardener Xue Pingui against the wishes of her father.

Disowned by her family and banished from the court,

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Precious Stream dwells in a cave with her pauper husband.

To make matters worse, after only one month of marriage,

Xue Pingui is summoned to fight in Mongolia. Shortly

afterwards, Precious Stream hears that Xue has been

killed in battle, when in fact he has been crowned King

of the Western Regions following military conquest. On

the day of his marriage to the Mongolian Princess of the

Western Regions, Xue flees back to China to Precious

Stream. The play concludes with reconciliation between

Xue, Precious Stream, and the Princess of the Western

Regions who has pursued Xue to China where she is palmed

off onto the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Despite its global success across the twentieth

century, the play has been relatively neglected in

Chinese theatre criticism. Recent English language

scholarship by Shen (2006), Yeh (2014, 2015), Du (2016)

and Thorpe (2016) has re-evaluated and contextualised

Xiong’s achievements, and some work in Chinese language

scholarship is recognising the value of his work to

Chinese intercultural performance history (Xiao 2011).

Nevertheless, Xiong’s contribution to post-1911 Chinese

theatre's engagement with Western drama has yet to be

fully recognised on the Chinese mainland. This relative

neglect partly arises from context: Xiong spent the

majority of his adult life abroad, and wrote most of his

published work in English. The play is a spoken drama,

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but its engagement with xiqu makes it a hybrid of Chinese

and British theatrical conventions. Such hybrids were not

unknown in China in the early twentieth century, but they

fell between the work of the new spoken drama

playwrights, and those who considered that xiqu,

especially Jingju (“Beijing opera”), was the form of

drama best placed to represent China to itself, and to

the world. As Joshua Goldstein highlights in his

meticulous examination of this period in Chinese theatre

history, there was a vehement turn against hybrids.

Aesthetic and ideological arguments demanded that

artistic work situate itself wholly in one camp or the

other (Goldstein 2017:129-133). Even so, Xiong’s work has

not received the same attention as other playwrights who

produced similar kinds of xiqu spoken drama hybrids in

the same period, such as Ouyang Yuqian (1889-1962). This

situation remains despite Xiong’s 1956 Chinese

translation of Lady Precious Stream being re-published on

the Chinese mainland in 2006 in a bilingual edition.

Xiong asserted that his translation and adaptation

had taken “very few liberties” with the text, and that

any alterations “matter little to the essential part of

the play” (Hsiung 1939:173). Yet, it is obvious that his

adaptation significantly distorted it, not least by

changing the title from 王宝钏 “Lady Precious Bracelet” to

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王宝川 “Lady Precious Stream”. Xiong waited until 1956, and

the publication of his own re-translation of the play

into Chinese, to explain this change. In his Foreword,

Xiong argued that whilst “Bracelet” (钏) was a poetic word

in Chinese, the English translation of “bracelet” or

“amulet” was comparatively unrefined. As a homophone,

“stream” (川) was monosyllabic like the original word

“chuan”, and offered a more poetic alternative in English

(Xiong 2006:192). Xiong also changed the structure of the

text by removing all arias and associated xiqu musical

structures to create a purely spoken drama (huaju). Thus,

in rhythm, pace, timing, and length, the play is

completely different from its source. Given that Xiong

claimed he had not used a specific text as the basis for

the play, but had instead “relied chiefly upon my memory,

as no complete version of the play was published in

China” (Hsiung 1939:179-80), such liberties are not

surprising. In addition, Xiong modified the narrative so

that Xue does not marry the Princess of the Western

Regions, but remains in a monogamous relationship with

Precious Stream. In the original, Xue marries the

Princess of the Western Regions, and the play ends with

the two women sharing Xue as first and second wife. Xiong

justified this alteration not in terms of adapting the

play for British sensibilities (which I nevertheless

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consider a significant motivation) but in asserting the

new modernity of China:

In ancient China, men were polygamous, so the King of

the Western Regions could have Lady Precious Stream as

his Queen-Proper and the Princess as his Vice-Queen.

Since the revolution in 1911, the law of our country

forbids a man to have more than one wife, and my

solution of the difficulty is the introduction of this

man of the world whose sole duty is to get an extra

lady off of my hands (Hsiung 1939:173-74).

This “man of the world” – a decidedly English idiom – is,

the play humorously informs us, a Minister who “must have

had many foreign affairs in foreign countries” (Hsiung

1939:173-74). The criticism implicit in this character,

and his rapid and very public affair with the Princess of

the Western Regions, offers a critique of the West as the

zenith of lax morality. The text implies that the more

contact the Minister of Foreign Affairs has with the rest

of the world, the looser his moral conduct becomes. As I

argue below, the desire to invert Orientalist stereotype,

and assert Chinese modernity (in the Western sense) is

layered into Xiong’s play, and this makes his achievement

all the more progressive for its time.

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However, attempting to assert Chinese modernity in

1930s London was by no means straightforward. Although

already in decline, the British Empire remained a central

dynamic through which the Other was interpreted. As Xiong

points out in the opening to his Afterthought cited at

the opening of this article, the very fact that he was

Chinese proved to be a significant barrier in the staging

of his work: British theatre producers and publishers

regularly dismissed him. As I argue elsewhere (Thorpe

2016), it was necessary for Xiong to portray himself as

an exotic character on London’s social circuit in order

to gain visibility. This visibility circumscribed the

possibilities open to him, but it also offered him a

cultural space in which to exist – a space that eluded

many Chinese in Britain as successive Chinatowns fell

into decline (Thorpe 2016:115-18). As Weihong Du has also

suggested “through emulating what is ‘recognizably

ethnic’ despite utter inauthenticity, Hsiung’s [Xiong’s]

adaptation process is a uniquely articulated cultural

brokering that works from within Orientalist

expectations” (Du 2016:361).

In such an unaccommodating context, it was a

necessity for Xiong to work collaboratively with British

theatre practitioners: he could not have staged Lady

Precious Stream alone. Indeed, Xiong’s unsuccessful

staging of later plays, mounted without the assistance of

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a prominent British collaborator, such as The Western

Chamber in 1936, and The Professor from Peking in 1939,

suggested that he needed a well-known collaborator. Lady

Precious Stream was successful not only because as a

comedy of manners it was the right kind of play for

British audiences of the period, but also because it was

supported by the fringe theatre company, the People’s

National Theatre, and co-directed by its principal

Producer, Nancy Price.ii

In fact, Price gambled all of her remaining funds on

the production. From the text, it is clear that the

collaboration between Price and Xiong produced a further

hybridised performance style. Comparisons between the

first edition of the play, published in 1934, and the

acting edition, published in 1936, demonstrate that

alterations had taken place to render some of the more

abstract performance techniques used in xiqu more

comprehensible to a British audience. For instance, the

1934 edition describes the following action for Xue

Pingui entering the stage on horseback:

A VOICE (off stage) Look out, a horse is coming!

HSIEH PING-KUI, in the uniform of a military officer,

arrives on horse-back, as is shown by his brandishing

a fancy whip with his right hand. On the girdle under

his riding-jacket there hangs a sword. He walks zigzag

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to show he is riding to the front of the stage, and

addresses the audience holding the whip across his

breast. (Hsiung 1934:55).

The above stage direction broadly describes the

conventional movements of a xiqu actor entering the stage

with a mabian (horsewhip). However, in the 1936 acting

edition of the play, the same entrance was described as

follows:

(PROPERTY MAN R., does horses’ hoofs for HSIEH’s

entrance. …)

HSIEH (off stage R.) Look out! A horse is coming!

(Enters R., picks up whip from PROPERTY MAN’s box R.

Gallops down R. to C.)

(Hsiung 1936:36).

Here, the sound of “horses’ hoofs”, made by the clapping

of coconut shells on a marble base, accompanies the

“gallop” of the actor as he moves from stage right to

stage centre. This alteration is significant. Not only

does Lady Precious Stream engage with textual adaptation,

but it also deals with theatrical adaptation at the level

of stage form and technique. The discrepancy between

editions suggests that some xiqu movements were

considered too abstract and incomprehensible for a

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British audience. Thus, a kind of pantomimic clarity –

and one that may well have amused the British audience

accustomed to mimesis – was deployed.

Whilst considering Xiong’s play as part of a larger

historical narrative concerning Chinese theatre on the

London stage (see Thorpe 2016), the above opened up an

interesting line of enquiry. To what extent could the

original production have engaged with the aesthetics of

xiqu? This is a particularly salient question given that

the rehearsal process was not conducted without

difficulty. Some members of the cast dropped out; the

character of General Wei remained uncast for some time

when actors repeatedly refused to take the role (Hsiung

1939:167-68). Because of this, the entire company was

assembled for a relatively short time before the

performance opened (Hsiung 1939:168). Xiong personally

attended rehearsals for four weeks to shape the

production (Yee 2002:144-45).

Academic research has tended to treat Lady Precious

Stream as a text to be read rather than a play to be

performed. What could Xiong hope to achieve with a group

of actors with limited or no knowledge of xiqu in a

relatively short space of time? A number of archives

afforded me a sense of the production through

photographic evidence, and the stage directions in the

Acting Edition were suggestive, but a detailed recording

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of the performance – as description, photography, or film

– was, and is, absent.

In order to engage with this absence, I decided to

stage the play in full in the Department of Film, Theatre

& Television at the University of Reading in December

2011.iii Drawing upon more than 30 undergraduate students

for a period of three months, I used archival research to

guide directorial decision-making. I wanted to try to

understand the intercultural and aesthetic dilemmas that

Xiong might have faced some seventy-five years earlier.

In what follows, I document the artistic judgements I

made as they arose from a dialogue with available

archival materials. Perhaps more significantly, I

document the rationale for decisions where there was a

paucity of archived material. By placing the same

importance onto archival absence as archival presence, I

sought to enter into a subjective and creative dialogue

with Xiong’s 1934 production, rather than attempt to re-

construct it.

Staging absence: retracing the performance of Lady

Precious Stream (2011)

AFTERTHOUGHT

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An Explanatory Postscript to ‘Lady Precious Stream’

stating the director’s reasons for wanting to stage

this Chinese play in the English language and

giving a brief account of those happenings in that

remote country known as England.

“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m

doing” – Wernher von Braun.

In a recent interview, the British director Max Stafford-

Clark suggested that directing a play is not rocket

science (Jays 2014), and perhaps I am guilty of over-

exaggerating the complexity of this discussion by framing

it through a quotation by von Braun. Yet, I believe that

this oft-quoted maxim is an apt description for practice-

as-research. After all, if I knew exactly what I needed

to do with a play, there would be no point in staging it.

From the discrepancies between editions of the play,

discussed above, I knew that there had been some

hybridisation in the process of staging the play in 1934,

but in order to find out how that might have been

expressed, I decided to stage the play in full.

Of the two editions of Lady Precious Stream

published around the time of the first London

performance, I considered that the Acting Edition offered

a more representative record of what actually took place

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on stage. As noted above, comparisons between the two

editions suggest that the first 1934 edition was

published as literature, rather than a practical record

of the how the play should be staged. In contrast, the

1936 edition, published shortly after the first run of

performances ended, offers a much better account of the

process of staging through the inclusion of significant

stage directions and sound cues. It also included some

photographs of the performance, a list of props, and an

indication of where music should appear. Of course, this

does not make it an accurate record of the 1934 staging,

but its publication date suggests that it was likely

informed by the first run of performances, even if it was

altered as the publication was compiled. In any case,

that Methuen considered it necessary to publish an Acting

Edition at all is testament to the play’s popularity

amongst professional and amateur performers alike in the

aftermath of the premiere.

Once I had worked out how to double up characters so

that I could assemble a more manageable cast of 14

actors, I began the process of finding a suitable

performance style. Earnest in my belief that this was a

very serious piece of early interculturalism, I began by

directing the actors to treat the script with utmost

seriousness. Of course, I understood that the play was a

comedy, but I was initially unsure as to what kind of

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humour it needed, and whether it was at heart “a serious

play”. I considered that I risked cheapening the text by

making it too lightweight. Yet, these decisions made the

text seem slow and heavy, with laboured performances. I

quickly realised that the performance style needed to be

self-conscious and light. One of my colleagues suggested

I take a look at the Carry On films from the 1970s – a

seemingly never-ending series of British films infamous

for their bawdy seaside humour. I watched a number of

these films, and so did the cast. As rehearsals

progressed, the less seriously the actors took the text,

the more the play came to life. The actors started to

have fun with the text, and the production started to

find its feet.

As I moved away from these earnest beginnings, I

discovered that Lady Precious Stream’s relationship to

its xiqu roots had been encoded into the production in a

deep and quite sophisticated way for its time. As we

started to investigate the blocking patterns, I

recognised xiqu staging. No one else involved in the

production had knowledge of xiqu, and yet those in the

rehearsal room were able to comprehend the meaning of the

movement patterns without knowing that they were, in

fact, derived from xiqu. In their simplest form, these

patterns meant that actors systematically entered from

the right of the stage and departed from the left; they

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stepped over a threshold to indicate a change from an

exterior to an interior scene. Other, less obvious,

movement patterns included servants crossing the stage

following the zhanmen 站門 (literally “stand at the door”)

pattern by entering the stage from the right, walking to

the centre, and then separating to stand towards the

front corners of the stage. To those not versed in xiqu,

this excessive formality simply appeared to confer a

sense of comic irony upon the oft said line “Please don’t

stand on ceremony, but be seated” whilst characters

waited patiently for patterns to be executed.

Irony was, in fact, littered across the text. When

the Western Princess’ army chased Xue through successive

Mongolian checkpoints to the border of China in Act

Three, the actors followed the zhui guochang 追過場 (literally “pursue across the stage”) pattern. This

pattern requires actors to enter the stage from the right

and exit to the left in quick succession to demonstrate

pursuit across different locations (Yu 2006:778-84). By

repeating the patterns no less than three times, there

was a reflexive sense of déjà vu in the scene. Xiong

recognised this, and comically exploited it by making the

same actor play the Gatekeeper at what are supposed to be

different checkpoints – the change of guard signified

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only by the same actor changing his appearance by donning

a beard.

As rehearsals wore on, it became clearer that the

play does not take itself very seriously. Once this was

fully recognised, I understood the complexity of Xiong’s

work. I recognised that, in actual fact, Xiong was poking

fun at some aspects of xiqu aesthetics that were

reflexively performative (such as the zhui guochang

pattern noted above). Yet, he also poked fun at British

actors who were not at all disciplined in the technique

of xiqu, and therefore needed a great deal of help with

explanatory stage directions from the author (no wonder

Xiong attended the four-weeks of rehearsal every day).

This self-conscious intercultural meta-theatricality

suggested to me that Lady Precious Stream was at once a

stereotypical Orientalist pastiche, but also a critical

comment on the limits of British acting technique, its

inability to grapple with the demands of stylised

movement. Situated in-between these two poles, Xiong

represents a Chinese artist more than able to engage with

the aesthetic concerns of both Western and Chinese drama

(as indeed did many of his “post-May Fourth”

contemporaries).iv Xiong speaks to the fact that Chinese

drama was more culturally open than British theatre of

the same period.

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These hybridised aesthetic concerns were also clear

in the scenography. The Acting Edition confirms that the

set should ostensibly consist of a carpet, table, and

chairs: the basic setting for most xiqu performances.

Yet, the photos of the stage also suggest a stylised art

deco that spoke to the early twentieth century prediction

for minimalism. The clean lines of the chairs formed a

silhouette against the brightly lit but plain backdrop

(the only decoration being the silhouette of a tree

branch extending outwards from stage right). The photos

also show that a large textile panel was hung across the

wings, stage left. This panel is now in the collections

of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (museum no.

T.159-1964). It was woven in 1863 to mark the Ninetieth

birthday of a man surnamed Huang, and donated to the

Museum by the Stewart Lockhart family (it was the

property of James Stewart Lockhart, 1858-1937, for more

than 40 years a British colonial officer in China and

Hong Kong). Its appearance as a significant part of the

scenography for Lady Precious Stream suggested that Price

had needed to ask friends and acquaintances from her

social circle for decorative items from China. This

assortment became props, setting, or costume. Indeed, the

Theatre and Performance Collections at the same museum

also holds one of the original costumes for Precious

Stream (museum no. S.1441-1984). It is not a costume made

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specifically for xiqu performance, but a Qing dynasty

qipao of high quality (see Fig. 1). As Price had limited

funds, such a “make do and mend” approach was probably

unavoidable, and the suggestion of opulence by a cascade

of chinoiserie may well have afforded enough of a

spectacle for the audience. Looking at production

photographs it is clear that the costumes were a mismatch

of imported clothes: they bear only a tangential

relationship to the social class of the characters they

were meant to portray.

INSERT FIG 1. SOMEWHERE AROUND HERE.

This shortcoming was pointed out to Xiong when the

famous Jingju actor Mei Lanfang (1894-1961) saw the

performance as he passed through London in the summer of

1935. Xiong was determined to try and use any influence

arising from the success of Lady Precious Stream to help

Mei obtain a theatre in London where he could perform

Jingju. Despite Xiong’s best attempts, he failed, and Mei

left London without having secured a venue. As a gesture

of thanks, Mei had arranged for costumes to be sent to

New York for the US production of Lady Precious Stream.

Furthermore, when Xiong returned to Shanghai to obtain

costumes for an unsuccessful 1936 adaptation of Xi Xiang

Ji (The Western Chamber) in London, Mei further helped

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Xiong to secure them. When Lady Precious Stream was

revived in 1939, the costumes from both Xi Xiang Ji and

the US staging of Lady Precious Stream were re-deployed,

and Mei was credited in the theatre program for arranging

them (Thorpe 2016:126).

In staging the production in 2011, obtaining

suitable costumes proved difficult. It was not possible

to borrow the kinds of costume used in the original

production and buying the costumes was too costly. In

order to respond to the xiqu costumes that were used in

performances following the intervention of Mei Lanfang, I

decided to use xiqu costumes wherever possible, and as

systematically as possible according to role-type. I was

able to borrow some costumes from Dr. Chan Cheng and

Sherry Chan, the former having set up the Jingju Piaoyou

Hui (Jingju Ticket-friends Society) for amateur

enthusiasts in London in 1949, as well as the Lundun

Jingkun Yanxishe (London Jing-Kun Opera Association) (see

Thorpe 2016:161-80). In many ways, I considered that

since Nancy Price had borrowed costumes from her circle

of friends, I should do the same by borrowing xiqu

costumes from members of the Chinese diaspora in London.

Nevertheless, significant gaps remained, and specific

costumes were shipped from a xiqu costumer in Shanghai.

In order to decide which costumes were required, it

was necessary to classify the central characters in

25

Xiong’s play according to xiqu role-type (jiaose).v Some

role-types were self-evident: for instance, the Prime

Minster Wang Yun was a lao sheng (old man) but with a

comic air of wen chou (civilian clown); Madam Wang was a

lao dan (older female); the Western Princess was wu dan

(martial female). Others required more thought. Should

the protagonist Xue Pinggui begin as a xiao sheng

(younger male), and to what extent should his role-type

develop as the narrative develops and he becomes older?

To what degree should the softer, emotive side of the

xiao sheng role-type be expressed in the early scenes? I

decided that the play was documenting the transition of

Xue Pinggui from a xiaosheng to a sheng, a kind of

“coming of age” where the slightly soppy young gardener

becomes a stoic military hero. Thus, I directed Xue to

begin as a rather soft young man who was nevertheless

confident in his future, and for him to grow into a more

physically commanding man of the world. Whilst I

considered that the male lead Xue Pinggui followed a

developmental arc, Precious Stream was in fact secure in

her own sense of self, and thus remained simply a dan

(female role).

Attributing role-types not only helped the actors

get an idea of how they might approach their roles, but

also framed the comedy of manners that is at the heart of

Xiong’s play. In particular, the use of character-types

26

enabled social class to be more sharply satirized. These

types were exaggerated to heighten the comedy, so that,

for instance, the Princess of the Western Regions (wu

dan) was directed to be gruff and masculine, with a deep

voice and clomping movements, at odds with the refined

civility of the Chinese court. Thus, when the Princess of

the Western Regions wryly points out when she visits Xue

Pinggui in China towards the end of the play, “to one who

has been born and bred in the Western Regions and

accustomed to the freedom there, their punctilious

etiquette and strange customs are most trying” (Hsiung

1936:102). This extremely intelligent piece of writing

positions the Western woman (Mongolian) as flummoxed by

the formalities of Chinese court culture, but in a play

written by a Chinese playwright and staged in London with

British actors. If the Western Princess is taken as

European rather than Mongolian, Xiong implies that

Western Europeans, who assume themselves to be more

civilized than the East, are in fact unable to comprehend

the nature of civility of the Chinese court. It is the

Westerners who are culturally ignorant: the Orientalist

stereotype is inverted. Xiong questioned whether

Westerners of the period really understood China. Could

British actors hope to grasp the formalized techniques of

xiqu? Xiong ingeniously uses meta-theatricality to

27

highlight his own questioning of intercultural politics,

and articulates a resistance to Orientalism.

The Acting Edition of Lady Precious Stream also

includes the speeches Xiong penned to introduce each act

(they are not present in any form in the first published

edition from 1934). In restaging the production in 2011,

I felt it important to make Xiong present, just as he was

in many of the Little Theatre performances from 1934

onwards. I considered Xiong’s appearance to be important

in challenging the representative power of yellowface

that was used by the otherwise entirely white British

cast of Lady Precious Stream.vi Xiong was able to use

himself to highlight how the imitation of yellowface was

only imitation, offering a means of opening up questions

of racial impersonation (but only, of course if the

audience was inclined to explore them). The absence of

an available actor of East Asian descent to play the role

of Xiong in my production made it impossible for me to

physically put him on stage. Naturally, I did not want

recourse to impersonation; the wider politics of

impersonation were already complex because of yellowface.

If I put Xiong on the stage physically, I considered that

I risked ratifying the practice.

To retain Xiong as a product of history, I decided

to put him on stage by asking the cast to recite some of

his published recollections of staging Lady Precious

28

Stream. These were delivered before the play-proper

started and after it had concluded. This meant that Xiong

appeared in what Marvin Carlson describes as the “haunted

text”, that is, a text that produces “a simultaneous

awareness of something previously experienced and of

something being offered in the present that is both the

same and different” (Carlson 2003:51). By staging the

archive, Xiong was ghosted: he spoke with his own words

in his own period, but he was not situated in the

present. Authorial absence, which I found significant to

the methodology of using the archive to guide the

decisions of making a performance, was beginning to

emerge.

In order to frame the play using this strategy,

the actors spoke Xiong’s autobiographical writing as they

prepared for the performance of the play. This allowed my

archival intervention to frame the performance of Lady

Precious Stream, but exist as a separate layer from it.

Dramatically, this necessitated placing the backstage

onstage, a decision that became more significant as

rehearsals progressed (see Figs. 2 and 4). As stated

above, I wanted to circumvent the authorising

representative power so often afforded yellowface in

British theatre, both historically, and in the

contemporary. vii By demonstrating its inherently

constructed nature, I felt I could allude to a number of

29

important dimensions concerning the act of yellowface,

specifically the reflexive act of pretence. By

highlighting yellowface as an act of self-conscious

affectation (the point of yellowface is that the audience

recognise that the actors are not East Asian), the

stereotypical and racist attributes of the play – such as

the obsequiousness of characters in formal situations –

would also be read as constructed. East Asians were,

after all, absent from the cast of the original

production, and this needed to be marked. These offensive

acts of racial impersonation needed to be historically

contextualised as a product of staging the play in London

in 1934 when there were relatively few Chinese actors

taking to the stage.viii Whilst there is much to Xiong’s

writing that is progressive, the performance nevertheless

participated in the racist politics of the period, where

explicit racial impersonation was commonplace.

I also anticipated that acknowledging absence would

further highlight the multiple acts of reconstruction and

interpretation at the heart of staging a production from

of archival material. Thus, actors were shown “yellowing

up” in front of the audience (something not undertaken in

the original), and they were seen passing across the back

of the stage in order to enter from the correct side of

the stage. Thus, there was a constant interplay between

30

actors “acting” as characters, performing as “actors,”

and “not acting” (Kirby 1972).

Temporally locating the play was also necessary

because the language Xiong deployed was littered with

early twentieth-century British idioms, such as:

Silver Stream: For shame, to chaff my dear one like

this! (Hsiung 1934:18)

Golden Stream: He is certainly playing the game!

(Hsiung 1934:43)

Precious Stream: Dear mother, you are indeed a

darling! (Hsiung 1934:158)

In fact, one of the remarkable things about the text is

how these idioms demonstrate Xiong’s command of English –

a command that was certainly at odds with British

expectations of a Chinese person at the time. Yet what

was a tour de force in the 1930s became a limitation for

a production in the twenty-first century. These idioms

root the play to its historical moment of production. To

cut them would be to diminish Xiong’s linguistic

achievement in adapting the play for a British audience

of the 1930s; to retain them was to sabotage the

contemporary relevancy of the work. I considered that the

only solution was to speak to both temporalities, to set

31

the play in 1934 but as a product of twenty-first century

research.

With the backstage already on stage, I extended this

to also perform processes of research. There was an on-

going dialogue between the archive and its live

enactment. I decided that any visual archival material

that I had used to shape the mise-en-scène of specific

moments in my production should be projected on to the

plain backdrop at the rear of the stage at the same time

as it was enacted. Not only did I anticipate that this

would create disjuncture between the historical sources

and their contemporary re-imagining (the haunted

performance text), but it would also actively highlight

my own interventions as a response to the material.

Indeed, whilst there were some photos from the 1934/5

stage production, some photos taken for publicity

purposes, published in Play Pictorial (vol.66, no.394,

February 1935, 3-6), were likely staged for a

photographer. The extent to which such images are

representative of the production itself is thus open to

question. Nevertheless, by drawing on these images, I

wanted to show how the original production was explicitly

both “there” and “not there” in my own work: a moment

past, but a moment influencing the present. This was

expressed in my first conceptual drawing for the

32

production (see Fig. 2) and realised in performance (Fig.

5).

INSERT FIGS 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 AROUND HERE.

The final thread to emerge from this line of enquiry

was that if Xiong was now present in the production

through autobiography, I also needed to be both

autobiographically present and absent to signal how the

performance was a contemporary product of an imaginative

dialogue with archival sources. In order to do this, I

decided to add yet another backstage area, this time

based in the present, so that my own journey through the

archives was aired. Thus, the conceptual framework for

the production began in 2011, with the crew running the

entire show visible to the audience, and with a 1934

back-stage area being built to the digitally recorded

sound of my voice reading out the email correspondence I

had undertaken with different archives (Fig. 3).

Background music made by The Matthew Herbert Big Band –

music that draws upon the 1930s Big Band aesthetic but

also uses digital technology to cut and sample sounds –

spoke to the concept of assembling disparate sources, and

of speaking to different temporalities simultaneously.

The actors entered the space dressed as themselves and

proceeded to change into 1930s “everyday” dress.

33

Once the backstage area was set, the houselights of

the theatre changed to the backstage lights of the 1930s,

Matthew Herbert’s music was replaced by a record from

1934 played from a gramophone situated at the rear of the

stage, and the actors changed from their 1930s everyday

clothes into their costumes for the play (Fig. 4). It was

during this time that Xiong’s autobiographical lines were

delivered. Mirroring the opening, the play ended with a

curtain call at the end of the play in 1934, and then

returned to the backstage area of the same year, where

actors got undressed and spoke more lines from Xiong’s

recollections. A final curtain call at the front of the

stage, with the houselights brought up in the auditorium

itself, signalled a return to 2011. The aim behind this

conceptual play-within-a-play-within-a-play was to allude

to both the time in which the play was written and the

contemporary moment in which it was produced, and to

further highlight the subjective nature of historical

reconstruction.

With the conceptual framework in place, the last

problem was to find suitable music. The licence holders

of the play, Samuel French, used to sell a recording of

the music and sound effects, which was available to

purchase along with the licence to perform. When I

contacted them to enquire as to its availability, they

informed me that the recording had long since sold out.

34

What is more, they had not kept a copy of the recording

in their archives. The aural record of the play was now

lost. Despite searching in numerous archives, and asking

for assistance from various networks, I was unable to

obtain a copy. The Acting Edition stipulated at which

points music was to be used, but did not stipulate what

that music should be. The only existing record I found

was a piano score published in 1936 for the US production

of a song called Lady Precious Stream, written by Edgar

Fairchild with lyrics by Milton Pascal. My production

needed live music but the Little Theatre, as its name

suggests, is small with only 377 seats, the orchestra had

to not take up much room. Therefore, I decided to arrange

all the music for the piano. The Fairchild composition,

although not historically accurate for the London

performance, became the overture, and was also played at

the opening, and closing of each of the four acts (with

one intermission between acts two and three).

Recognising that one piece of music could not

sustain a performance of almost three hours, I decided to

look back to the xiqu original for inspiration. Because

Jingju music is made of both basic fixed tunes (qupai)

and beat-tune form (banqiangti), I opted to incorporate

both types.ix Fairchild’s work stood for the qupai (the

precedent for this was that Cantonese Yueju regularly

absorbed fixed tunes from outside xiqu into its

35

repertoire), whilst I adapted music from the Jingju score

in the beat-tune form. One salient example was the

following fragment in erhuang (the “erhuang mode”) manban

(slow metre in 4/4 time):

[INSERT FIGURE 8 HERE]

This fragment was rendered into Western musical notation,

with a simple left hand accompaniment for the piano:

[INSERT FIGURE 9 HERE]

This tune, used in the xiqu version of the play for the

female (dan) lead’s first entrance was also used for

Precious Stream’s entrances in my staging. There is no

way of knowing to what extent Xiong followed a similar

musical trajectory in 1934. Nevertheless, I considered

that the incorporation of dramatically appropriate music

from Jingju and Western chinoiserie-inspired tunes

encapsulated the intercultural/Orientalist aesthetic at

the heart of Xiong’s play.

Re-archiving absence

As I noted in the introduction, it has taken me several

years to write this reflection upon the decision-making

36

process behind the project. I felt I needed time to

reflect upon the decisions I made to have some kind of

historical distance before archiving the performance in

writing. My Afterthought could only come after thought:

it was only from the state of absence that I felt able to

subject my own records of the process to analysis. This

time-lapse does not make this article-as-archive more

“accurate”, or “objective.” Rather, I am inclined to

suggest that this lapse makes the archive more

subjective, partial, absent, and as a consequence,

genuine.

It is strangely coincidental that Xiong also left a

five-year gap between the opening run of Lady Precious

Stream in 1934, and writing his fullest recollections of

it which were published in 1939, and which have framed

this article. Looking back, I can see that staging the

production enabled me to better comprehend Xiong’s

achievements in the context of numerous constraints. He

clearly recognised the limitations of his situation. He

had not formally studied xiqu, so perhaps he never

contemplated teaching xiqu movement techniques to a group

of British actors. Yet, he obviously understood the

dramaturgy of xiqu staging, and sought to carefully

encode the relevant movement patterns into the text. The

result was a truly intercultural mise en scène that

enabled actors to move around the stage according to

37

formalised xiqu conventions. Upon watching a documentary

made by members of the Xiong family that interspersed

scenes from my own production with those from a CCTV

televised Jingju production of Hong Zong Lie Ma, even I

was surprised at how similar they were. There are moments

when the mise en scène is identical.x For this to have

first been achieved on the West End stage in 1934 in a

matter of weeks is a remarkable feat. Historically, this

production was an important development in moving away

from the clichéd and pastiche-laden performances that had

come before it.

Theatre historiographer Gilli Bush-Bailey suggests

that “new scholars and new forms of scholarship are

beginning to emerge, as practitioners engaging with the

histories of their craft in self-reflexive and critical

research seek to situate their own practice within a

historical context” (Bush-Bailey 2012:287-88). I suggest

that this reflexive mode exists in all aspects of

practice-as-research, including archiving once the

practical project is complete, and as such, becomes an

archive where the physical presence of the author exists

only as a trace in writing. Yet, there is reflexivity in

Xiong’s own archive where he retains a remarkable

presence that is at once humble, but nevertheless

suggestive of a strong desire to be in the limelight

(literally, by taking to the stage during performances of

38

his own plays) and to be publicly recognised for his

talents. I leave the final say for both of us to him --

the concluding lines of the same 1939 afterthought that

opened this article:

In conclusion, I wish to record my hearty thanks to

all my friends who have directly or indirectly

encouraged me to write plays in the English language,

and particularly to producers, actors, and actresses

on both sides of the Atlantic for their gracious

indulgence in sticking to my original lines when, in

their heart of hearts, they were itching to replace

them with much better phrasing (Hsiung 1939:198).

Author Bio

Ashley Thorpe is Senior Lecturer in Theatre in the

Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance at Royal Holloway,

University of London. He has published two monographs:

The Role of the Chou (“Clown”) in Traditional Chinese

Drama (Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), and Performing China on

the London Stage: Chinese opera and global power, 1759-

2008 (Palgrave, 2016). He has also published articles in

Asian Theatre Journal, Contemporary Theatre Review,

Studies in Theatre & Performance, and TRI.

39

Bibliography

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Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David

Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, 281-98. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: the Theatre as

Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian

Impression. Translated by E. Prenowitz. Chicago &

London: University of Chicago Press.

Du Weihong. 2016. “S. I. Hsiung: New Discourse and Drama

in Early Modern Chinese Theatrical Exchange.” Asian

Theatre Journal 33,2:347-68.

Fairchild, Edgar. 1936. Lady Precious Stream – From the

Morris Guest Production “Lady Precious Stream” by S. I.

Hsiung. New York: Edward B. Marks.

Goldstein, Joshua. 2007. Drama Kings: Players and Publics

in the Re-Creation of Peking Opera, 1870-1937. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Hsiung, S.I. 1934. Lady Precious Stream. London: Methuen.

Hsiung, S.I. 1936. Lady Precious Stream: Acting Edition.

London: Methuen.

Hsiung, S.I. 1939. The Professor from Peking. London:

Methuen.

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Jays, David. 2014. “Blanche McIntyre: the stage director

who works hard to make it all look easy.” The Guardian, 5

October. Accessed: 1 February 2017.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/oct/05/blanche-

mcintyre-stage-director-accolade

Kirby, Michael. 1972. “On Acting and Not-Acting.” TDR,

16,1:3-15.

Liu, Siyuan. 2016. Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre.

London & New York: Routledge.

Mitter, Rana. 2004. A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle

with the Modern World. Oxford and New York: Oxford

University Press.

Shen, Shuang. 2006. “S. I. Hsiung’s Lady Precious Stream

and the Global Circulation of Peking Opera as a Modernist

Form.” Genre 39,4:85-104.

Thorpe, Ashley. 2016. Performing China on the London

Stage: Chinese Opera and Global Power, 1759-2008.

Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wearing, J.P. 1996. “Nancy Price and the People’s

National Theatre.” Theatre History Studies 16:71-89.

Wichmann, Elizabeth. 1991. Listening to Theatre: the

Aural Dimension of Beijing Opera. Honolulu: University of

Hawaii Press.

Xiao Kairong. (2011) “Cong Jingju dao Huaju: Xiong Shiyi

Yingyi “Wang Bao Chuan” yu Zhongguo Xiju Xi Chuan.” Xinan

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Daxue Xuebao (Shehui Kexue Ban) 37,3. Accessed: 27

January 2017.

http://xbbjb.swu.edu.cn/XDWK/2011/1103pdf/2011-3-149.pdf.

Xiong Shiyi. 1956. Wang Bao Chuan (Juben). Xianggang:

Xiju Yanjiushe.

Xiong Shiyi. 2006. Wang Bao Chuan. Beijing: Shangwu Yin

Shuguan.

Yeh, Diana. 2014. The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and

the Struggle for Modernity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong

University Press.

Yeh, Diana. 2015. “Staging China, Excising the Chinese:

Lady Precious Stream and the Darker Side of Chinoiserie.”

In British Modernism and Chinoiserie, edited by Anne

Witchard, 177-198. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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42

i Xiong Shiyi is Romanised using the contemporary Pinyin system. Up

until the 1960s, the Wade Giles system was more common, which

Romanised his name as Hsiung Shih-yi. I have opted for the current

Romanisation in this article, but have left sources in the Wade-

Giles system where they appear under that name.

ii The brainchild of the theatrical entrepreneur and critic J.T.

Grein, who firmly believed in independent theatre, the PNT was a

subscription organisation. Members paid two shillings and sixpence

a year to join, which entitled them to see all productions for the

price of one shilling and sixpence. Non-members would be asked to

pay two shillings and sixpence, plus tax. It was anticipated that

this financial model would facilitate a sustainable venture that

would guarantee actor’s wages of five pounds a week for one month,

being extended if the play was a success. Grein approached the

actress Nancy Price about the venture, and she agreed to work with

him to establish the PNT (Wearing, 1996:71). Price makes no

mention of Lady Precious Stream in her memoir Into An Hour-Glass

published in 1953, though there is evidence that the PNT was

broadly interested in Asian theatre. The PNT Magazine from October

1933 included a two-page article, “The Theatre in Japan,” written

by the noted Japanese poet and translator Gonnosuke Komai who was

living in London at the time. In his memoirs, Hsiung recalls that

Price became very excited about the play following its

recommendation by the noted English actor Jonathan Field (1912-

1990).

iii The performance was staged in the Bulmershe Theatre, Minghella

Studios, Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of

Reading, 8-10 December 2011, and then the Islington Chinese

Association, London, 16-17 December 2011.

iv The May Fourth Movement, or New Culture Movement, was named after

a student demonstration held on May 4th 1919. The demonstration was

in response to the Treaty of Versailles, which dictated that

German interests in Shandong should be ceded to Japan rather than

to China. Although named after it, the movement was operative as

early as 1915, and sought to challenge the centrality of Confucian

doctrine to all forms of Chinese culture, including literature and

drama, in the search for a new kind of post-imperial nationalism.

With the rejection of Confucianism, there came instead a critical

examination of Western ideologies, including capitalism (and its

role in colonialism), communism, individualism, and social

equality (including the equal treatment of women). Advocators for

a new kind of Chinese culture also critically engaged with Western

forms through the translation of texts (Xiong played a part in

this by translating British playwrights such as Shaw, Barrie and

Galsworthy into Chinese), and wrote literature in the vernacular

so that the general populace could better comprehend it. See

Mitter 2004.

v There are four role-types in xiqu: sheng (male), dan (female),

jing (painted face) and chou (clown). The visual appearance of the

actor – through make-up, costume and movement – immediately

indicates the social status, age, ideology and even morality of

the character, to the audience.

vi In this context, yellowface involved actors making up their faces

with white pigment to make their faces appear paler, and the use

of black paint to accentuate the eyebrows, and change the shape of

the eyes.

vii For instance, in January 2017, British East Asian actors staged

a protest outside the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill, West London

following the decision to cast Howard Barker’s In the Depths of

Dead, set in ‘ancient China’, with an all white cast.

viii The only East Asian actors to have played significant Chinese

roles in London’s West End prior to 1934 were Anna May Wong and

Rose Quong. See Thorpe, 2016: 96-101.

ix For a general overview of xiqu music, see Thorpe in

Liu, 2016:134-8. For a more thorough investigation, see Wichmann,

1991.

x This documentary can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=o932pUECB_Q&feature=em-upload_owner