2020 Edition

Drama in Oriental Cultures

 Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East
does not show such diversity, despite its variety of cultures and
subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may be seen in the three
great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a
courtyard, like the simplicity of the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom
to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of India’s greatest
playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century CE), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by
simple suggestion and mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with
charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite untrammeled by realism,
lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure stories
completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are
without the pain of reality, and his characters never descend from the
ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate to the Hindu aesthetic of
blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the
idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama
and the broader, less courtly manner of
the Chinese and its derivatives in
Southeast Asia. These plays cover a
large variety of subjects and styles, but
all combine music, speech, song, and
dance, as does all Asian drama. Heroic
legends, pathetic moral stories, and
brilliant farces all blended spectacle
and lyricism and were as acceptable to
a sophisticated court audience as to a
popular street audience. The most
important Chinese plays stem from the
Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in which an
episodic narrative is carefully
structured and unified. Each scene
introduces a song whose lines have a
single rhyme, usually performed by one
singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been
refined to an extreme. The plays have
strongly typed heroes and villains,
simple plots, scenes of bold emotion,
and moments of pure mime.
 The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of
gesture and mime and its symbolism of setting and
costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging
from religious ritual, maintained a special refinement
appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences.
Kabuki (its name suggesting its composition: ka,
“singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th century
became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is
reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the Greeks in the
remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic
characters, in its limit of two actors and a chorus, and in
the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the
other hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in
popular history, and the actors, without masks, move and
speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki
plays are less rarefied and are often fiercely energetic and
wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a
broader audience. The written text of the Noh play is
highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal
expression, and formal in its sparse plotting, whereas the
text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for
spectacle, sensation, and melodrama. In Kabuki there can
be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but
also moments of violent passion. In all, the words are
subordinate to performance in Kabuki.