When news spread in 2000 of Xingjian being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, China quickly responded negatively. ‘‘This shows that the Nobel Prize for Literature has virtually been used for political purposes and thus has lost its authority,’’ the then director of the Chinese Writers’ Association declared in the online edition of the People’s Daily. He further commented that ‘‘China boasts many world-famous literary works and writers, about which the Nobel Committee knows little.’’ China’s Foreign Ministry also called the award a political maneuver the nation took no pride in.

While most other commentators around the world praised Xingjian for his brave dissident status, the fact was that most Westerners—and most Chinese—had never heard of Gao Xingjian. True, he had received several awards in France, where Xingjian had been living in exile since 1987, and most of his major works had been translated into English and the major European languages, but the esoteric worlds of his plays and prose works had never appealed to a broad audience. In fact, prior to the Nobel committee’s decision, several United States publishers rejected Soul Mountain, the novel that he has become best known for.

The Other Shore was written for the Beijing People’s Art Theater in 1986 but not produced until 1990 in Taiwan and again in Hong Kong in 1995. After the Nobel Prize Award in 2000, Xingjian’s dramatic work finally began receiving more widespread attention in the United States.

In a 2000 review of The Other Shore, the Chinese University Press edition of the anthology in which the English translation of the play was included, Howard Goldblatt, writing in World Literature Today, does not refer to the play itself, but calls Xingjian a ‘‘major figure in world drama, and the most innovative, if not the most famous, playwright China has produced in this century.’’ He goes on to call the translations by Gilbert C. F. Fong ‘‘smooth, idiomatic, and lively.’’ ‘‘Elegant when called for, colloquial when demanded,’’ he adds, ‘‘the language retains the illusion that the characters are speaking in English, and contemporary English at that.’’

In a 2002 Journal of Asian Studies review, Deirdre Sabina Knight calls ‘‘the wretched loneliness of the characters’’ that inhabit Xingjian’s plays the one element that unites the plays collected in the anthology. As for The Other Shore itself, she writes that as Man’s ‘‘beleaguered search for direction lays bare the dangers of collectivism for any sort of moral rectitude, he ends so bereft of counsel that he resorts to compulsively rearranging mannequins.’’ Knight calls the translation successful ‘‘in conveying much of the effect of Gao’s inventiveness, particularly the repetitive chanting timbre of the dialogues,’’ but concludes by saying that the ‘‘plays are above all performances, and their power comes forth when they are acted aloud by multiple overlapping voices.’’

In 2003, Sons of Beckett’s West Coast in Los Angeles premiered The Other Shore. In a Los Angeles Times review of the play, Rob Kendt called the play

essentially a series of individuation psychodramas: The group discovers the communion of language, then turns it against one another; the group, under the sway of a demagogue, gangs up on an honest man; a young man finds himself spurned by mother, father, girl and society.

Kendt writes that the performance itself was ‘‘nothing so much as an experimental theater class in which very green actors rehearse/emote/create a purportedly avant-garde show.’’