The Silent Noras: Women of the First Chinese Performance of A Doll's House

Abstract

This article analyzes the first fully verifiable Ibsen performance in the history of Chinese theatre—Nala (Nora) in Beijing in 1923—by a group of female students from the famous Beijing Nüzi Gaodeng Shifan Xuexiao (Peking Normal College for Women). Among scholars of Chinese theatre, this performance has often been overlooked and deemed insignificant. I argue that this performance is significant not only because it sets an example for the hundred-year Ibsen performance tradition on the Chinese stage but also because it challenged the public perception of women in theatre. This article takes issue with the dominant discourse on Ibsen's role in Chinese women's liberation, where men—the "new youth" and by and large "Ibsenites"—liberated women. It reorients the women as the pioneers of staging Ibsen in Chinese theatre. Based on first-hand archival research, I present a detailed theatre historiography of the performance while contextualizing it in the lived realities of the female students at PNCW at that time.