Thunderstorm is a tragic play involving complicated blood relationships and numerous inevitable tragic coincidences that occur in the 1930s in China. It is a dramatic feat with profound connotations and heart-stirring artistry. The story unfolded around Zhou Puyuan, a male character who had been to Germany to study. Cold-blooded, selfish and hypocritical, he was like a dictator of a dark dynasty in his home. Zhou Puyuan is a well-portrayed character in Thunderstorm. All sinful acts were attributable to his domestic autocracy. The profound significance of Thunderstorm lies in its exposure of the close political and ideological bond between Chinese capitalists and the deep-rooted feudal traditions.
Cao Yu (曹禺; September 24, 1910—December 13, 1996), born as Wan Jiabao (萬家寶/万家宝), was a renowned Chinese playwright, often regarded as China's most important of the 20th century. His most well-known works are Thunderstorm (1933), Sunrise (1936) and Peking Man (1940). It is largely through the efforts of Cao Yu that the modern Chinese "spoken theater" took root in 20th-century Chinese literature.
also 4.5 stars literally so gripping and DEFINITELY greek tragedy vibes but also parasite vibes really really good and then when you find out that cao yu’s mum died and his father married her twin... the plot makes so much sense lol i enjoyed this so much actually there’s so much to unpack
I was actually quite impressed by this Chinese incest story. The whole thing happened in just one day! I was a little annoyed by the stage signals, though, but they also helped me understand the character better. (雷雨 is a script)
Este o piesă interesantă și dureroasă, dar și cu o lecție foarte clară: greșelile făcute te pot urmări toată viața dacă refuzi să ți le asumi. Poți încerca să le ascunzi, să construiești peste ele o viață nouă, dar trecutul nu dispare. La un moment dat revine și poate dărâma tot ceea ce ai construit tocmai pentru că nu ai avut curajul să-l înfrunți la timp.
Thunderstorm has a special place in my heart. Reading it brought quite some nostalgia. Though, I'll have to say that the pieces and fragments that I've previously seen in school simply pale in comparison to the play in its entirety. The devil lies in the detail, not just the broader scandals and general characterisation, but in the minute differences and shifts in attitude that reflect the complex relationships between... well, basically everyone in this play.
Something that hit me exceptionally hard is the repeated idea that one past mistake brought the wave of disaster upon this 'family' (such tragedy! Fanyi, Shiping, Ping, even Puyuan to some extent all carry some level of this guilt). But were those mistakes truly mistakes? Or simply results of broken concepts of morality and human desire? ... I think I've been reading too much tragic literature that comment on East Asian societal failures these days. Maybe it's time to pivot to some happier books.
A lot of familiar twisted-family-drama themes packed to the powder keg’s brim, as though all of Ibsen was squeezed into a Chinese powder keg. Still, very well executed— particularly around the title’s motif: an oppresive, coiling storm that releases with a flash and a bang
Equal parts compelling and horrifying. I could barely bring myself to turn the page and see what happened next, so I can only imagine the intensity of watching Thunderstorm as a staged production. Draws on classical Greek tragedy and developing conceits of realist drama alike, but the resulting product is something wholly unique and surprising.
The secrets buried inside the Zhou family, the incest, the unknowingly violated blood ties, the sins of one generation returning through the bodies of the next...it carries that same merciless logic found in "Oedipus". Yet it never feels like Cao Yu is simply transplanting Greek tragedy into China. The tragedy grows organically from the particular violence of this family, its hierarchy, its class structure, and above all from the authority of its patriarch.
What disturbed me most was the idea of 'children becoming the victims of their parents’ unfinished lives'. Almost everything the younger generation suffers originates in decisions made before they were old enough to have any say in them. The children inherit relationships whose meanings have been deliberately hidden from them.
That is where the Oedipal quality becomes so painful. The horror is not only 'incest', but also the 'knowledge arriving too late'.
Like Oedipus, Zhou Ping and Sifeng have already crossed the boundary before they discover that the boundary exists. They are guilty of something they never consciously chose to do. The revelation does not prevent the catastrophe. The revelation IS the catastrophe. And Cao Yu makes the whole thing even more twisted because Zhou Ping has already participated in another forbidden relationship: his affair with his stepmother, Fanyi. That relationship is different because there is no ignorance to protect them. They know exactly who they are to one another.
Fanyi is perhaps the character I found most emotionally complicated. It would be easy to reduce her to the hysterical, jealous woman whose desire helps destroy the household, but that reading feels terribly inadequate. She is trapped inside Zhou Puyuan's house and beneath his authority. Zhou Ping becomes lover, escape route, rebellion and obsession all at once. Her desire is destructive, certainly, but it is also one of the only things in her life that seems genuinely hers. When Zhou Ping withdraws from her and turns toward Sifeng, her desperation becomes increasingly cruel. She participates in the destruction around her, yet she is also one of the people whom this family structure has already destroyed. The tragedy refuses to give her the comfort of being purely victim or purely perpetrator.
And that ambiguity is everywhere.
Parents love their children and ruin them.
Lovers desire one another and destroy one another.
People attempt to escape the past and unknowingly walk straight back into it.
The wealthy Zhou household presents itself as orderly and respectable while underneath it is an absolute mess of abandonment, exploitation, sexual transgression, resentment and buried identities. The more desperately the family tries to preserve appearances, the more grotesque those appearances become.
Even class becomes tangled with blood. Lu Dahai is not merely a worker confronting a mine owner: unknowingly, he is a son confronting his father. Zhou Ping and Sifeng are not merely a wealthy young man and a servant girl attempting to escape together: unknowingly, they are brother and sister. Cao Yu makes social divisions and biological relationships overlap until the family becomes almost impossible to untangle. The violence inside the household mirrors the violence outside it. Zhou Puyuan's power over his family and his power as an industrialist begin to look like manifestations of the same instinct, to control people, decide their place, and assume that the consequences can be buried.
But consequences in "Thunderstorm" do not stay buried...The children are not simply punished for the sins of their parents in some neat moralistic sense. That would almost be easier. Instead, they are 'constructed by those sins'. Their identities, relationships and desires have been unknowingly arranged by choices made decades earlier. They walk into traps they did not build.
This is why I hesitate to describe what happens as "karma." Karma would imply a comprehensible moral balance: you commit a wrong and eventually suffer the appropriate consequence. The work is crueler than that because suffering does not remain attached to the guilty. Cao Yu himself resisted understanding the play simply as retribution. In his preface he described something closer to an incomprehensible "cosmic cruelty": a governing force behind human struggle which Greek dramatists might have called fate. That idea completely changed how I understood the storm itself. The thunderstorm is not just dramatic scenery waiting conveniently outside the window. The entire play feels electrically charged long before the literal storm finally breaks. Secrets accumulate like pressure in the air. People enter rooms carrying information other people cannot possess. Every conversation threatens to expose something. Everyone seems to know one piece of the truth, while nobody knows enough of it to understand the whole.
And then, eventually, everyone knows.
The truth is simultaneously the thing everyone needs and the thing they cannot survive.
Yet what makes "Thunderstorm" more than an exercise in fatalism is that its catastrophe is simultaneously cosmic and painfully human. Fate may hover over the play, but human beings have built the machinery through which fate operates. Zhou Puyuan made choices. He abandoned Shiping. He concealed the past. He created a household governed by hierarchy and fear. Fanyi makes choices. Zhou Ping makes choices. Shiping makes choices. Nobody possesses the whole truth, but everybody adds something to the disaster.
So by the end, I wasn't left thinking, 'How unlucky these people were.'. I kept thinking: 'the children never had a chance to know what they were walking into.'. The parents bury their shame and continue living. Their children grow up on top of the burial ground.
Then they fall through it.
Cao Yu turns the family home into something almost mythological: a place where the past has been locked behind doors for so long that when those doors finally open, nobody inside can survive the air that comes through. It is melodramatic. At points, almost outrageously so. The coincidences accumulate, the relationships become impossibly entangled, and the final catastrophe is enormous. But strangely, that excess did not weaken the play for me. It made sense within its tragic universe. Greek tragedy also understands that sometimes ordinary realism is simply too small a container for certain kinds of human horror.
And perhaps that is what I found most devastating about Cao Yu's tragedy: the people who finally pay for the past are not necessarily the people who created it. The parents commit the original violence, conceal it, rationalize it, survive it...And then their children inherit the bill.
Giờ mới được đọc kịch Lôi vũ của Tào Ngu :( Cũng may nhờ trước đây kém hiểu biết, chưa từng nghe tên vở kịch, cũng không được biết trước nội dung kịch, nên giờ mới có thể thưởng thức nó trọn vẹn như vậy....
i wholeheartedly believe that once your stage directions surpass more than a page then you’re better off just writing a short story or something...like this was very much telling & not expressing, which was ironic, considering this is a script. anyway this still managed to hold my attention just bc there’s so much happening btwn the characters; the main cast felt very lively even on the written page. it was the characters that made this so intense; the story itself was just okay, it was predictably horrifying, copious amounts of dramatic irony, etc etc. i know cao yu deliberately modeled this after western tragedy (oedipus rex???) but i think i didn’t take to this one because of exactly that reason, since it felt like something i’d read/heard before
i don’t think i’ll ever reread this outside of class since it didn’t personally resonate with me & the stage directions are astonishingly tedious lmao, but i think this does have the potential to be great on stage! but since against all odds this still freaked me out pretty badly i will not be looking for an adaptation god bless.
I have been trying to find the perfect 80th book this year for some time. I suppose the only Chinese book I've read this year is a pretty good choice.
This is an incredibly engaging, incestuous, and dramatic play. I love the complexity of the characters and the restraints of Chinese society on gender and class relations that they reveal.
We read this in Chinese class by having students role-play the characters. I happen to be reading the lines of my favorite character Fan Yi. It was a great experience being able to see the events from her perspective.
I took 0.5 stars off because I think she deserved better revenge. The stage directions can be a bit long and boring at times, and the ending was wrapped up a bit too abruptly. I would've liked to see more of what happened to the characters that survive.
Cao Yu signe une excellente pièce qui met en scène la confrontation de deux familles lors d’une nuit d’orage, sur fond d’inceste, de lutte des classes et de mensonge. Le rendu final ressemble à s’y méprendre au film Parasite, très en avance sur son temps sur la question de la place des femmes et des vices que la richesse entraîne.
A love story like Romeo and Juliet's, Chinese version, with a generous amount of twists! These two turned out to be....not going to spoil it! It is worth reading it! I also saw this live as a play in the theater and it definitely helped in rating this book even higher than just five stars.
Fantastic. Even if I don’t think the Greek tragedy comparisons are 100% accurate, it did have me in act III when I started realizing what was going on, so there’s that.