SOURCE: Kuoshu, Harry H. “Will Godot Come by Bus or through a Trace? Discussion of a Chinese Absurdist Play.” Modern Drama 41, no. 3 (fall 1998): 461-73.

In the following essay, Kuoshu compares Bus Stop to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and explores the motif of waiting in both plays in terms of their different cultural contexts.

The Bus-Stop, written by Gao Xingjian and performed by The People's Art Theater of Beijing, is a Chinese lyrical comedy that emerged with a group of experimental plays in Beijing in the early 1980s.¹ The play creates a bizarre situation of waiting, and its resemblance to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was pointed out by certain Chinese critics soon after its premiere. Since the playwright has a background in French literature, this observation came as no surprise;² nevertheless, it played its role in a quickly aborted political campaign of “anti-bourgeois-contamination.” A Party-authorized critic used...