As the curtain rises, we see four camcorders set in the four corners of the stage, a large screen hanging at the back, and then four people marching on to the stage: Mrs Wen (Mrs Alving), her son An Shihua (Oswald), her maid Lu Jiana (Regina), and Lu Sichuan (Engstrand), her maid's purported father. The four bring themselves to their designated camcorders in the four corners and then preen in front of the lenses, their faces projected on to the large screen, faces twisted with whatever secrets and demons they each harbour within themselves. Thus begins the 2014 production of Ghosts 2.0 in Beijing, an audacious reimagining of Henrik Ibsen's 1881 play – an experimental, multimodal theatrical production that relocated the story to contemporary China.

This chapter studies the staging of Western modern(ist) drama in contemporary China. It features examples of drama associated with modernism as well as more recent examples of ‘modern drama’ that come out of the tradition of modernism. It begins with a brief overview of the introduction of Western modernist drama in China in the 1920s and its reintroduction in the 1980s and then focuses on the first two decades of the twenty-first century, during which many modernist plays have been rediscovered and restaged. Such reimagined modernist classics are often characterised by an audacity to experiment, for example, hybridising traditional Chinese theatre art forms with those ‘imported’ from the West, blending both realist and (post)modernist theatre in the same theatrical event, and relocating the story from its source culture to today's China to speak directly to the sociocultural, moral and psychological concerns of target audiences. Among these productions of reimagined modernist classics – notable for how they push the boundaries both artistically and sociopolitically – are Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (1881), Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan (1943), Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953) and Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros (1959). Also included in this chapter are Chinese productions of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive (1997). These examples of modern drama offer unique breakthroughs in a Chinese context, complementing those offered by earlier modernist plays.