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Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance. By Jo Riley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. vii + 348. £45; $64.95 Hb.

This is a record of Riley's personal observations of Chinese theatre during the 1980s and her discussions with Chinese actors. As a Western student who has studied theatre in China, she has benefited from intimate access to theatre circles and can glean much information that a Western practitioner or theorist cannot hope to gain merely through seeing performances. Such experience could not be obtained before the 1980s, since when the radical economic reforms have brought a relaxation of many political and ideological controls. In addition, and in her dual capacity as both an 'outsider' and 'insider', the author notices some interesting aspects of Chinese theatre that a native Chinese spectator may take for granted. Riley correctly points out that in Chinese theatre each actor does not stand alone on the stage as an individual representing a role. Rather (s)he is overshadowed by the inheritance of her/his teachers and the traditions of the particular genre. She develops this idea in the organization of her study. Each chapter is named with Chinese characters— meaning 'appearance', 'family', 'identity'—and generally takes Mei Lanfang and one of his jingju, or Peking Operas, as the starting point. Although this practice is not consistently followed, it does offer vivid description and detailed analysis of the articulation of the gestures and body movements of jingju performance technique. The author's investigation of Chinese theatre is not limited to jingju, but also includes puppet theatre and nuo theatre—a theatre of exorcism and rites which enjoys popularity mostly in nationalminority ares in the south-west of China. Riley aims to cover a wide range of Chinese theatrical work, but her survey—ranging in just one chapter from jingju to puppet theatre and to nuo—sometimes makes forced and arbitrary comparisons and can be unclear, especially for a reader who is not familiar with Chinese theatre. For instance, in the section 'The Dissected Body', the author first talks about the jingju body movements and the exercises performers need to go through, then moves to the nuo theatre and its hand gestures commenting on their meanings. She then comes back to jingju, on to the ancient poem 'Nine Songs', and then to marionette theatre, concluding with information on the steps of nuo theatre and its images of thunder and cloud. Such back and forth discussion, involving many Chinese terms in the three different types of theatre, demands painstaking effort from the reader. While jingju, puppet theatre and nuo may employ some similar gestures or body movements—and some may find even more similarities between jingju and wnshu, Chinese martial arts—they do not share the same direct origin.