Abstract
Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was firstly translated and staged in China in the early 1980s, when China had just ended decades of political turbulence and started to reform itself and open up. The Chinese creation and reception as well as the Norwegian reception of this Peer Gynt production, in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that the inexhaustible work of art “is made by all those who find a material in decoding it and commenting on it”, reveal that different interests were invested from many different parties. Situated in a transitional period in modern Chinese history marked by political uncertainty, how was the first Chinese performance of Peer Gynt created and received in China? In Norway, the Chinese translation and production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was positively received by the Norwegian authority and got reported by influential Norwegian media. But how did the Norwegian authority positively respond to this Ibsen event in China? How did the Norwegian news outlets report the first Chinese Peer Gynt? In order to address all these questions, I will separate my analysis into two parts, the Chinese interests and the Norwegian interests originated from this production. By focusing on this particular production and placing my analysis against the historical background of the relationship between Ibsen and the Cultural Revolution, and between Ibsen and the SinoNorwegian interchange, I hope to shed light upon how Ibsen was used with different interests that originated from the creation and reception of the 1983 Peer Gynt production in China. As such, this thesis claims that the production, closely connected with the Chinese historical contexts, was used in the early 1980s to initiate the renovation of the Chinese theatre stage, while at the same time was used to improve the Sino-Norwegian relationship.