On Chinese Imagery In The Plays By The Contemporary Irish Playwright Mark O’Rowe

Born in Tallaght,a suburb of Dublin,Ireland,Mark O’Rowe(1970-)was an iconic playwright on the rise of the Irish theatre scene in the 1990 s.His major plays include Howie the Rookie(1999),Made in China(2001),Crestfall Island(2003)and Terminus(2007).In1999,Howie the Rookie won the George Devine Award,the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Award for Best New Play,and is recognised as O’Rowe’s masterpiece.Of particular interest are his two plays,Howie the Rookie(1999)and Made in China(2001),in which he writes about suburban life in Dublin with numerous Chinese elements,such as Kung fu hero Bruce Lee,Shaolin Temple and Hong Kong films.This reflects both the expansion of Irish theatre in a period of globalisation,when it is no longer confined to the larger narrative of ‘cultural identity’,and the cross-cultural imagination of Irish popular culture and the smaller narratives of individual survival at the bottom of the society.Since the early twentieth century,the ‘Chinoiserie’ that had been prevalent in Europe has also been blowing across the island of Ireland,from Irish playwright Denis Johnston’s(1901-1985)The Moon in the Yellow River in 1931 to O’Rowe’s Made in China in 2001,the Irish culture ‘bringism’ and imagining of distant China is evident.This paper is divided into four chapters,the first of which introduces Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe and his two works,The Howie the Rookie and Made in China,the current state of research on these two works at home and abroad and the research method of comparative literary variation,pointing out the relative lack of domestic interpretation,especially O’Rowe and his plays about Chinese imagery.The second chapter,Chinese Kung fu: The Spread of Chinese Fever in the Irish Suburbs,is a close reading of the text that highlights the Chinese elements in the plays and points to the Chinese fever that is prevalent in the Irish suburbs.Chinese elements in both plays are not mere embellishments,but key drivers of character relationships and twists of fate.The third chapter is Aesthetics of Violence: cultural bringism in the context of globalization.This section focuses on the Irish cultural reception context in which Chinese imagery is borrowed,analyzing the current state of suburban Ireland,the borrowing of the aesthetics of violence in the play and its cultural bringism.It shows the dark side behind the economic prosperity of the“Celtic Tiger”,a“black pastoral”(Grene:2),which was also the trend of Irish theatre in the 1990s,and the‘violent aesthetic’prevalent in the 1990s.The fourth chapter,from the perspective of comparative literary variation,highlights the mutated reception of Chinese imagery in O’Rowe’s plays.The Chinese imagery in O’Rowe’s plays is not simply fetched,but mutated,showing that the central characters Howie and Kilby in the two plays reflect O’Rowe’s “misreading” of Chinese martial arts philosophy.The analysis of O’Rowe’s use and misreading of Chinese imagery and its variation and acceptance in his plays leads to a conclusion from the perspective of a Chinese researcher:For one thing,the borrowing of Chinese imagery/cultural images in O’Rowe’s plays is a reinforcement of his examination of Ireland’s own social phenomena and his opinion on them.In O’Rowe’s urban writing,the Chinese imagery,although embodied in O’Rowe’s play as the glue of lower-class youth relationships,constructs an image of the ‘Kung fu’ Irishman.However,there is no doubt that this imagery,while superhumanly masculine,are at the same time aggressive,symbolising violence and disorder and showing the self-destruction of man.Secondly,what needs to be grasped more clearly and dispassionately by Chinese researchers is the connotations and transmutations of Chinese imagery(Chinese culture)in other cultural contexts.The lack and ambiguity of the characters’ understanding of China in Howie the Rookie and Made in China,as well as the use of the term ‘Chink fish’,reveal O’Rowe’s cultural imagination,cognitive bias,and even the collective unconsciousness of racial discrimination in cross-cultural fetishism.The intercultural perspective on the imagery of China in foreign literature has positive research and reflective significance in the current reality of humanistic exchange and mutual appreciation between China and other civilisations.As early as the late nineteenth century,imagery of Chinese culture entered the vision of Irish writers and appeared in literary texts,such as Wilde’s book review A Chinese Sage on Zhuangzi,Yeats’poem Laplis Lazuli on Taoism,George Bernard Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah portraying Confucius,etc.By the end of the twentieth century,Chinese Kung fu in O’Rowe’s plays,etc.,the imagery of China in Irish literature from an intercultural perspective was even richer and more diverse.