Editor's picks

Second time around

Meng Jinghui (pictured right), China's leading avant-garde theater director, staged Soviet poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1928 satire, The Bedbug, in Beijing and received wide acclaim for using a live rock band on stage. Some 13 years later, the veteran director joins hands with band member Jiang Tao to restage the production. The Bedbug deals with a worker, Prisypkin, who proclaims that he has paid a high enough price for revolution and a new society, and now seeks to advance himself and work his way up the social ladder. He touts a guitar, exchanges his work overalls for fashionable clothes, drinks and pursues the good life. He plans to marry the daughter of a petty-bourgeois hairdresser. In the course of the alcohol-laced wedding celebrations, a fire breaks out. Everyone dies in the fire except Prisypkin, who takes refuge in a cellar and survives. But as the cellar fills with water, Prisypkin is encased in a block of ice. Fifty years later in a future socialist society he is revived from the ice by white-coated, antiseptic scientists, who inform him of his second chance of life.

The rock band is not the selling point this time, instead, the new production will have an open section that invites viewers to go onto the stage to discuss and perform the possible ending.