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Will Godot Come by Bus or through a Trace?: Discussion of a Chinese Absurdist Play

The Bus-Stop written by Gao Xingjian and performed by The People's Art Theater of Beijing, is a Chinese lyrical comedy that emerged with a group of experimental plays in Beijing in the early 1980s. The play creates a bizarre situation of waiting, and its resemblance to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was pointed out by certain Chinese critics soon after its premiere. Since the playwright has a background in French literature, this observation came as no surprise; nevertheless, it played its role in a quickly aborted political campaign of "anti-bourgeois-contamination." A Party-authorized critic used The Bus-Stop’s re-semblance to Beckett's play to label it anti -socialist, assuming that the futile waiting in the play shows a loss of confidence in socialism a loss ascribed to contamination by "bourgeois, idealistic, egoistic world views." Although The Bus-Stop was degraded by Party authorities in the short-lived campaign, more experimental plays, one of them by the same playwright and performed in the s...