The Theatre of One: Gao Xingjian's Total Theatre and the Threefold Actor
From The Bus Stop to Snow in August, Gao Xingjian set out to revive the very theatricality that realism had flattened.
Place Gao Xingjian inside the great twentieth-century revolt in the theatre, and the enemy he is fighting becomes clear: the stage flattened by realism. After Ibsen, the theatre came to resemble a sitting room behind a fourth wall, an audience peering through glass at a slice of "real life." Gao wanted the opposite. He wanted not illusion but theatricality itself.
His method was to return to the oldest bargain the theatre ever struck: a bare platform, an actor, and an audience who know it is all pretend and choose to believe anyway. In The Bus Stop, a group waits under a sign for a bus that never comes, and the waiting becomes the entire action. Wild Man folds ecology, folk song, shamanic ritual and philology into one stage-space. The Other Shore lets the collective character "People" form and dissolve through rite. These plays refuse a linear story; they turn the stage back into a place that can hold several times at once.
The threefold actor
Gao's most original contribution is his re-description of acting. Borrowing the Chinese-opera tradition in which the performer precedes the role, he proposes that three people stand on stage at once: the actor as body, a "neutral self" that steps back to watch, and the character being played. The actor does not "become" the role; he keeps a visible distance from it, stepping in and out in full view of the audience.
An opera performer can tell you, in a single gesture, that this is a performance. That self-awareness is exactly what Western realist technique labours to erase.
Grammar follows. Characters often speak of themselves in the third person — "he walks forward" — and only then does the movement come. Language and body are prised apart, and what the audience sees is no longer a copy of life but the act of life being staged.
Total theatre
The idea reaches its limit in Snow in August, a modern Chan opera about the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, that fuses Peking opera, opera, spoken drama and modern dance into what Gao calls "total theatre" — song, speech, movement and symphony all present on the same night. It chases no single genre's purity; it lets every means be present at once. This is at once a distant echo of the Gesamtkunstwerk and a modern translation of the synthetic nature of Chinese opera.
Reading Gao's plays, the better question is never "what does it say" but "what does it make happen on stage." The answer, again and again, is that it makes the audience aware they are sitting in a theatre — which is precisely why he thought drama could never be replaced by film.