DRAMA MASTER: Cao Yu, dubbed "China's Shakespeare," is the founder of Beijing People's Art Theatre (XINHUA)

Highlights

"Looking at the hundred-year history of Chinese drama, two things stand out the most: One is the work of Cao, and the other is the performing school created by Jiao," said Tian Benxiang, a renowned scholar who once served as head of the Drama Institute at the Chinese National Academy of Arts.

Cao, founder of the theater, was a genius playwright. He published his first dramatic work entitled Thunderstorm, regarded as the groundbreaking work of Chinese drama, at the age of 22. When the play was performed on stage in Shanghai in 1936, audiences were shocked.

Nearly 80 years later, it remains the most frequently performed drama by most theater groups. Even world-famous kungfu master and actor Bruce Lee once performed a role in it.

Many have praised Cao's storied career, first as a performer and later as a playwright. He once played as the hero in a drama based on A Doll's House by Henrik Johan Ibsen. Cao himself reserved praise for an accomplished peer in the theater business, once saying that "BPAT can go without me, but it can't go without Jiao."

Jiao of BPAT was like Stanislavski for the Bolshoi Theatre of Russia. Jiao was a master of the Chinese dramatic stage arts, said Tian.

Born in December 1905, Jiao was a famous director, drama theorist and translator. In 1931, he founded the Chinese Opera Junior College and boldly adopted a new education system and teaching methods, cultivating a group of illustrious performers of Peking Opera.

Jiao studied English, French, Russian and Latin, and in 1935 he went to Paris University in France to study European drama theory, with an emphasis on the Stanislavski system—a series of techniques used to train actors to convey believable emotions in their performances.

When BPAT was founded in 1952, he became its vice president.

While directing Long Xu Gou, Jiao for the first time implemented the Theory of Inner Vision, drawing forth inspiration from real life into his stage characters.

"The actors should first carefully observe and experience life to form inner visions deep within their heart, and then use their imagination to master these visions from the outside," said Jiao.

Applying these theoretical techniques to the stage made the performance of Long Xu Gou starring Yu Shizhi and Yezi an unprecedented success.

Laoshe, the original writer of the drama, earned the title of People's Artist, the highest honor for the Chinese literature and art circles.

And the people living in the real Longxugou, a drainage ditch in the south of downtown Beijing where the story was set, were amazed by the play's accurate depiction of real life. "The characters seemed to have walked right out of our neighborhood and onto the stage," a resident once said.

Yezi was later chosen as a representative of the Municipal People's Congress of Beijing.