'To Live' to be staged in Germany

Play director Meng Jinghui attends a press conference on the play "To Live" in Beijing on Thursday January 23rd, 2014. [Photo/CRIENGLISH.com]

The Chinese play "To Live" will be staged in Germany in next month.

The play stars Huang Bo and Yuan Quan and is adapted from Chinese novelist Yu Hua's novel of the same name. It keeps the original work's pure and simple style and absurd satire.

The play has been performed more than 50 times in 16 cities in China in the last two years. More than 100 thousand people have been to see it.

The play's director Meng Jinghui told CRI that he was excited about the performance in Germany and said his interpretation is very different from that of the film version made by Zhang Yimou. He said, "It's very clear that the greatness of Yu Hua's novel absolutely does not lie in telling stories. More importantly it presents murmuring, crying out of the inner intrinsic life of a person. It's a dialogue of a man's life. This is very important. Our play mainly tries to present this."

The drama will be staged in Deutsches Theater Berlin and Thalia Theater Hamburg in early February. This is the first time that the Chinese drama is staged in foreign countries. 

To Live gets a life on German stage

Changing stages