Cao Yu

Cao Yu (1910-1996) was one of the most important Chinese playwrights of the twentieth century. He wrote spoken drama in the Western manner, a form that was only beginning to take root in China after the May Fourth Movement, and his plays did much to establish that tradition in modern Chinese literature.

Born into a well-off family, he grew up in Tianjin, a cosmopolitan port with a strong Western presence. His aunt, who raised him, took him to both traditional opera and Western-style plays. At Nankai secondary school he acted in productions of Ibsen and O'Neill, even taking the role of Nora in A Doll's House. He then studied Western languages and literature at Tsinghua University, reading Shaw, Chekhov, Gorky and the Greek tragedians. He completed his first play, Thunderstorm, around 1934.

Thunderstorm was published in a literary magazine and drew large audiences in several cities, including Tokyo. Its story of a family destroyed by a corrupt patriarch, with incest at its scandalous centre, made his name, although critics have pointed to technical flaws. Sunrise and The Wilderness continued his exploration of people broken by a hostile society.

During the Japanese occupation he took refuge in Chongqing, where he wrote patriotic works. His most admired play, Peking Man (1940), is not about the war at all, but about a well-off family unable to adapt to modern society. After 1949 he directed the Beijing People's Art Theatre until his death, and his earlier plays, read in a Marxist light, were widely performed in the 1960s.

His legacy is twofold: he gave Chinese spoken theatre a lasting tradition of its own, and he became the first Chinese playwright of international reputation.