Theatre
咖啡店之一夜
Not translated into English
Tian Han · 1922
Synopsis
At the beginning of winter 1920, in a small café in a large Chinese city decorated with chrysanthemums and tropical plants, Bai Qiuying serves the customers. She has left her village to join her fiancé, Li Qianqing, a student from a wealthy family, and waits for him while earning her living. Among the regulars, Lin Zeqi, a student whose father wants to marry him off as he sees fit, drinks to forget, and an old customer remarks that the hands of the poor and those of the rich never join. One evening, Li Qianqing enters the café with another woman.
Context
Tian Han composed the play in Japan during his studies, and revised it in Shanghai in the early 1930s; it is this version that is most read today. He transposes into it a café culture he had known in Japan: a small gaslit establishment, coffee and milk, a stove, Chinese flowers set beside exotic plants. Theatre historians count the author among the three founders of Chinese spoken drama. An Italian translation was offered in 2021 in a thesis at Ca' Foscari University, and the BnF knows of no French version.
Who it is for
A short text, in a single act with a handful of characters; no French translation has appeared to date.
Prizes and reception
Britannica counts his one-act plays of these years among his most expressive and most powerful works.
Sources for this page 7
The pages consulted to check this page.