The Orphan of Zhao – Zaju Theatre

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In The Orphan of Zhao, we encounter a theatre of self-cultivation and ethical governance—one that Foucault would recognize as a historical technology of the self forged in the crucible of Confucian duty. The story, which follows a physician who sacrifices his own son to save the orphaned heir of a murdered noble family, dramatizes not only personal sacrifice but the making of a virtuous subject—one who internalizes the law, not as coercion, but as moral artistry.

Foucault’s concept of askēsis, the spiritual exercises through which one transforms the self into a worthy ethical subject, finds a poignant manifestation here. The physician Cheng Ying does not merely obey duty; he enacts it, stylizes it, suffers it into being. His decision to substitute his child is not commanded by force—it is self-imposed, deriving from his care of the self as a relational being in the moral cosmology of Confucian society.

This theatrical narrative thus becomes a matrix of subject formation: each act of silence, disguise, or deferred vengeance constitutes an aesthetic reworking of self, a disciplined poetics of delayed justice. The orphan, raised by the very man who sacrificed his family, undergoes a mirrored transformation. When he learns his past, he becomes an ethical subject through knowledge, yet does not act in pure retaliation. Instead, he chooses restorative justice—a Foucauldian gesture of self-control rather than sovereign retribution.

Foucault also emphasized how power is not only repressive but productive. In The Orphan of Zhao, theatricality itself is power’s productive medium—generating new selves through ritualized suffering, narrative revelation, and spectacular performance. The Zaju form—with its alternating prose, poetry, song, and stylized movement—is itself a technology that produces truth in the self, particularly truth bound to filial memory and ethical continuity.

Thus, this is not only a story of revenge—it is a spiritual training ground for filial subjectivity, where selfhood is constituted through moral endurance and the care of others, across time.