A Babel of Nature: The English-Language Sources of Zheng Junli’s “Tan biaoyan” (On Acting, 1936)

Abstract: Zheng Junli (1911–1969) was a left-wing stage director, actor, and moviemaker in modern China. Known as one of the first translators of Stanislavsky’s writings into Chinese, he worked in tandem with his colleagues to produce a translation of An Actor Prepares (1936), the English-language recension of Stanislavsky’s acting manual, resulting in Yanyuan ziwo xiuyang (An Actor’s Self-Cultivation, 1943). This article examines how Zheng made of Stanislavsky’s ideas on acting before setting out to translate An Actor Prepares . It focuses on a 1936 manuscript “Tan biaoyan” (On Acting) by Zheng that chronicles the emergence of “natural acting” on the British and French stages from the mid-sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. A large portion of “On Acting” is in fact a patchwork of translated excerpts from different English-language texts, among which are The Theatre by the American cultural critic Sheldon Cheney (1886–1980), The Drama by the English actor-manager Henry Irving (1838–1905), and the English version of The Art of Actor by the French comedian Constant Coquelin (1841–1909). The three primary source texts had proposed different conceptions of naturalness that were juxtaposed against each other in Zheng’s manuscript, hence giving rise to a Babel of Nature. I argue that the layered message that “On Acting” conveys is analogous to Stanislavsky’s precepts enunciated in An Actor Prepares : the ultimate aim of acting is to create artistic truth rooted in (human) nature, and to this end an actor must study and live the part. For Zheng and his fellows in the mid-1930s, natural acting was a shorthand for the expressive revelation of character’s interiority.