Presenting plays for the people

Feng says that the theater has made four large-scale tours to Shanghai in 1961, 1988, 2012 and 2014.

"Personally, the 1988 tour was unforgettable because I was a young actor at the time, and I traveled to Shanghai with established artists for the first time. We performed classics, such as Teahouse, which was very successful," he says, adding that after Shanghai, the theater will take additional shows to Suzhou and Nanjing, in Jiangsu province.

In May, it will tour Serbia with Our Jing Ke, which was written by winner of Nobel Prize in literature Mo Yan and directed by Ren Ming (1960-2022).Premiered in 2011, the play is a reimagination of the household story of Jing Ke, an assassin famous for his failed attempt to kill the king who later became China's first emperor over 2,000 years ago. It will be the first foreign performance by the theater after the pandemic.

In 2024, it will also stage the second round of performances of a new play, Zhang Juzheng, which premiered between Dec 22, 2023, and Jan 14.Directed by Feng and Yan Rui, it follows the story of Zhang Juzheng, the famous politician who led the reforms to the economy and of official evaluations during the reign of Ming-Dynasty (1368-1644) Emperor Wanli.

Unlike big-budget presentations, the theater's smaller productions offer its young talent the opportunity to experiment. They will also be a highlight of this year, and include an adaptation of My Poor Marat by Aleksei Arbuzov and directed by Lin Cong, I Love Peach Blossom by Zou Jingzhi and directed by Ren Ming, and The Orphan of Zhao directed by He Bing.

The theater also performed 12 shows at universities in 2023 for ticket prices of less than 40 yuan, in the hopes of appealing to young theater lovers. Feng says that students are an important part of the theater scene as many decide to make theater a their career after falling in love with it.

This year, to mark the 90th anniversary of Cao Yu's Thunderstorm, which was published when the playwright was in his final year at Tsinghua University and was just 24 years old, a series of events will be held at universities.

Thunderstorm has been described as one of China's most enduring dramas of the 20th century and Cao Yu has earned the title of "father of the country's modern drama". He was appointed director of the Beijing People's Art Theatre in the early 1950s and elected chairman of the Chinese Dramatists' Association in the early 1980s.