Wu Zuguang (21 April 1917 – 9 April 2003), also known as Wu Zhaoshi and Wu Shao, was born in Beijing to a family from Wujin, Jiangsu, and became one of modern China's leading playwrights as well as a film director and social critic. His father, Wu Ying, had taken part in the founding of the Palace Museum and was known for poetry and painting. He attended the Kongde School and then the literature department of Zhongfa University, leaving after a year to serve as secretary to the head of the National Drama School in Nanjing. In 1934 he published his first short story, Gong E Yuan, and in youth he was known as a 'child prodigy'. His first play, City of Phoenix (1937), dramatised the anti-Japanese guerrilla hero Miao Kexiu and became one of the most influential patriotic plays of the war years. Between 1937 and 1948 he lectured at the National Drama School, worked as a director for the Central Youth Drama Troupe and the China Drama Arts Society in Chongqing, edited the literary supplement of Xinmin Evening News and the magazine Qingming, and served as a director for Hong Kong's Great China Film Company and Yung Hwa Motion Picture; as his drama school moved to Hunan and Sichuan during the war he taught language and Chinese drama history while writing plays. He went on to write more than thirty plays, including The Song of Integrity, Lin Chong's Night Flight, The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, Jianghu and the 1942 Returning Home on a Snowy Night, widely regarded as his masterpiece; he was also known for poetry, prose, calligraphy and painting. In 1947 a banned play forced him to flee to Hong Kong. In 1951, introduced by Lao She, he married the Pingju performer Xin Fengxia, who starred in his adaptation Hua Wei Mei, filmed in 1963 as a model of modernised traditional theatre; Lao She acted as witness at the wedding. In 1955 he directed the opera film Mei Lanfang's Stage Art for Beijing Film Studio, and he also wrote Peking operas such as Wu Zetian and The Three Beatings of Tao San Chun for the Peking opera companies of Beijing. Branded a rightist in 1957, he was barred from publishing for nearly two decades and was only politically rehabilitated around 1980. His Peking opera The Three Beatings of Tao San Chun was staged at the London International Festival of Theatre in 1985. He died in Beijing in April 2003.
Wu Zuguang brought wartime and historical subject matter onto the spoken-drama and operatic stage, and both City of Phoenix and Returning Home on a Snowy Night are still regularly revived. His Pingju adaptation Hua Wei Mei, written for Xin Fengxia, helped keep that work in wide circulation. In the 1940s he worked as a director for the Hong Kong studios Great China Film and Yung Hwa, part of the early wave of mainland film people who came south. The political campaigns after 1957 left him and his wife as a well-known example of artists caught up in those purges.
Achievements
- 1934 · Published his first short story, Gong E Yuan
- 1937 · Wrote his first play, City of Phoenix, on anti-Japanese resistance
- 1942 · Completed his best-known play, Returning Home on a Snowy Night
- 1948 · Worked as a director for Hong Kong's Great China Film and Yung Hwa studios
- 1951 · Married Pingju actress Xin Fengxia, introduced by Lao She
- 1980 · Politically rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution