Gender performance in urban space: the reconfiguration of female identity in Waiting for Godot in China

Samuel Beckett stipulated that female actors should not perform in Waiting for Godot for its existential universalism, a restriction many practitioners have sought to overcome. Since the late twentieth century, Chinese dramatists have revisited this restriction, adapting the play by recasting tramp characters as women and relocating its setting within rapidly transforming urban spaces. Focusing on three key productions—Ren Ming (1998), Zhang Xian (2001), and Feng Yuanzheng (2015)—this paper traces how post-socialist commercialization reshaped performance aesthetics into the digital age. Drawing on spatial theory, gender theory and Chinese scholarly perspectives, it argues that these adaptations do not simply substitute female bodies for male ones. Instead, they reframe Beckettian absurd waiting as a gendered, spatialized condition shaped by China’s consumerist cities: Ren Ming frames waiting as fin-de-siècle decadence; Zhang Xian exposes the commodification and visual consumption of female bodies; Feng Yuanzheng constructs the stage as a media-driven surveillance field of feminine temperament. Together, they mobilize Godot to negotiate visibility, agency and subjectivity within China’s restructured urban modernity. This analysis highlights localized feminist aesthetics in reinterpreting canonical modernist drama and offers a fresh angle for global Beckett studies.