Show and tell

For 63-year-old Shan Wancheng, who has worked for a State-owned enterprise for four decades and is going to retire in less than two years, making his debut onstage at the sixth Wuzhen Theater Festival on October 18 was one of his best days.

Performing in Chinese director Li Jianjun's latest play, Popular Mechanics, which premiered as one of the four opening plays, Shan shared his story of being a singer in a choir as a child and a lover of the arts as an adult, ending up his monologue by saying that "I have never been away from theater and it was the fulfillment of a lifetime ambition to start acting professionally".

Besides Shan, 17 amateur actors played in Li's Popular Mechanics, including a young female nurse in her early 20s, a welder, who dropped out of school and works in Beijing, and a 6-year-old boy, who loves watching movies. Like Shan, they all love acting and shared their stories with the audience.