The article aims at presenting Bertolt Brecht's theatrical concepts and their influence on the contemporary Chinese theatre. His plays began to reappear on Chinese stages in the late 1970s and were performed by experimental and professional theatre groups in Hong Kong and Taiwan, particularly in the 1980s. However, a narrow group of Chinese artists got acquainted with the aesthetics of Brechtian theatre, propagated by Huang Zuolin, in the 1950s. Brecht was then seen as an inspiring source of theatrical quest by Gao Xingijan in the 1960s. The article analyzes the concept of actor and models of acting developed by Gao Xingijan and Bertolt Brecht. The emphasis placed by the Chinese theatre on the actor and acting techniques turns out to be fully compliant with what Brecht was searching for.
