Nobody Buys an Extra Ticket for the Avant-Garde. So How Did Meng Jinghui Become China's Best-Selling Theater Director?

"Whenever people mention avant-garde theater, they say, 'Hey, it's that damn Meng Jinghui, he's taken over the word avant-garde.' I think that's great. It took me 20 damn years to take over that word. It wasn't easy."

Last week, the play Amber ran at the Poly Theatre in Beijing, and Meng Jinghui went to almost every performance. He wasn't there to take a bow. He stayed backstage, watching for whatever was still wrong with the show.

Amber has been running for 10 years. It is one of Meng Jinghui's signature productions and one of his best sellers. When it premiered in Hong Kong in 2005, nearly 10,000 tickets sold out within two weeks, a box-office record in the 33-year history of the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Today plenty of young new faces still walk into the theater. Many of them have never seen a stage play and have no interest in understanding the so-called "avant-garde." They come for the name "Meng Jinghui."

In Chinese theater, avant-garde and Meng Jinghui mean the same thing. At the most visible level, he stages midnight shows, makes immersive performances, and designs theaters unlike anyone else's. His stages never lack wild ideas, and there are always audience members who leave asking how on earth they were supposed to understand the show.

This has led some people to suspect that Meng Jinghui makes his work look so "avant-garde" just to sell more tickets.

"That's complete bullshit," Meng Jinghui said. "Nobody sells one extra ticket because of the avant-garde. Only if you say you're conservative will people say, 'Mm, very watchable, great story, real human feeling, the plot rises and falls beautifully.' Only the traditional makes money."

He has a clear definition of his own work and of the "avant-garde." First, the play carries social criticism. Second, its aesthetics are contemporary. Third, he does not stage the well-known traditional repertoire. He wants the stage to belong not only to those who make the work and those who watch it, but to be a portrait of social life as a whole: immediate, imaginative, and poetic.

Meng Jinghui believes this is what separates him from other theater companies, state-run and small alike. Those companies may have their own ambitions, but they don't quite know what they are after.

In July this year, the poster for Amber went up on the poster board at the Poly Theatre

These "ambitions" and "wishes" ended up in plays that bear an unmistakable Meng Jinghui stamp, such as Rhinoceros in Love, Amber, and Two Dogs' Opinions on Life.

In 2008, because Rhinoceros in Love had become a hit, his studio rented the Beehive Theater in Beijing for a permanent run. After a while they realized they couldn't keep performing only this one play and needed to put on something else. So Meng Jinghui began rehearsing new plays, which of course also meant new actors and new staff. Once there were several plays, some of them went on tour. In 2014, the studio rented the Avant-Garde Theater at the Yihai Theater for another permanent run.

A still from Rhinoceros in Love

Last year alone, Meng Jinghui's plays gave nearly 900 performances across the country to 450,000 people, an average of 500 per show. Attendance barely varies from play to play; the only difference is whether tickets sell slowly or quickly.

Three to five of his plays running at once in different cities on any given day is normal for Meng Jinghui's studio. Beijing, the country's busiest performance market, saw 4,519 stage-play performances last year. Besides one show a day at the Beehive Theater, Meng Jinghui's company also rents larger theaters for other productions.

In April last year, Meng Jinghui's plays were staged in five different cities at the same time for the first time. The studio's staff were run off their feet and thrilled. By November, the number of simultaneous shows had reached eight, and when that new record was set, nobody batted an eye. Yet for all that pressure, no performance has ever gone wrong. If something did, said Wang Hao, the publicity director, everyone would pitch in together.

Meng Jinghui has 15 plays in all. That is his own estimate; when he actually counts them studio by studio, the number may be higher.

A still from The Mermaid by the Dead Water

The "Murder in the Hanging Garden" group performs 7 plays. The "Rhinoceros in Love" group performs 5. The "Two Dogs" group has 3, the "Letter from an Unknown Woman" group performs one, and the "Er Ding Yi Xiao" group has two. That adds up to 18.

All these plays rotate between the two permanent theaters and tours of cities in China and abroad, and the company must also handle surprises, such as the state suddenly needing a play to represent the country at a cultural exchange. Meng Jinghui's studio has a formidable tour manager who draws up the touring schedule. He is said to be so formidable that he can recite everyone's phone number in the studio from memory.

Becoming "the avant-garde theater director" has made Meng Jinghui less likable. He rarely attends commercial events and avoids the media where he can. "Once you say you're an avant-garde theater director, you have nothing left to say to other people. A lot of people stop paying attention to you, and you don't waste words on them either," Meng Jinghui told QDaily.

He spends most of his time at the studio with his team. Counting the actors, the studio now has 80 to 100 people, and the real number involved may be larger, because some work without a contract, such as the stage designer Zhang Wu, a frequent collaborator.

Organizing all these people and tasks is no easy job. When Wang Hao talks about the studio, the word that comes up most is freedom.

Nobody clocks in. The daily work discussions can cover plays, films, romance, gossip, anything at all. An auntie cooks for everyone, and when she isn't around, people volunteer to cook. The studio has clearly defined departments, but almost no one is tied to a single role. As long as you can handle it, someone in publicity can also help choreograph dances and write plays.

At the studio, Meng Jinghui mostly manages the actors. He says he casts on instinct: some people are perfectly good but just not the right fit. Actors must share the studio's taste and know what makes a play awful and what makes it good. He, his actors, and the troupe grow up together. Meng Jinghui thinks this may be one of the ways he differs from many other troupes.

A shared "aesthetic" matters a great deal to Meng Jinghui. New actors first go through a period of getting to know the place, and what stays with them most is the book club, where everyone talks about what they have been reading. During this period some people leave and some stay. One staff member said that everyone in the studio shares remarkably similar interests and tastes. Gradually the way they talk, the way they dress, the music and films they like, even the food they enjoy, all grow alike.

Once actors have spent some time in the studio and settled into its taste and atmosphere, they tend to stay a long time. Huang Xiangli, who performs the one-woman play Letter from an Unknown Woman, is on stage 300 days a year. In a little over 5 years, she has given more than 1,800 performances.

The actor Huang Xiangli in a still from Letter from an Unknown Woman

"Our actors are really good, and I'm not bragging. In contemporary Chinese theater, our actors perform the most, spend the most time on stage, appear most often at the theater festivals and arts festivals of international seasons, go abroad the most, and have the widest horizons. Singing, training, acting, fighting, singing, dancing: they are a group of young people who have absorbed the newest ideas in contemporary theater. We're number one, there's nobody else, nobody. Only my place is in step with the rest of the world," Meng Jinghui said.

During our interview, when the subject turned to the theater market, Meng Jinghui twice spoke with real anger.

The first time was about the "crisis of spoken drama" that critics talked up in the 1980s. The whole theater world was debating that phrase. "How ridiculous! That bunch of people. It makes me angry just thinking about it now. Damn it, instead of seriously trying to make good theater, they sat there talking about a crisis of spoken drama."

As Meng Jinghui sees it, audiences are created. Spoken drama has an important lineage: ancient Greece, Shakespeare, then Molière and Ibsen, then Stanislavski, then Brecht, then the modern and contemporary masters. "If there's no audience now, we blame the creators who came before. If spoken drama has no audience 20 years from now, who do we blame? Today's creators."

"Back then I didn't want to be blamed, so I've kept working to contribute my own energy to the long river of theater history," Meng Jinghui said. The reason nobody talks about a crisis of spoken drama now, he said, is that his generation of young people ignored those critics, experts, and so-called national-level directors, and worked hard to put on good plays.

The other thing that angers Meng Jinghui is National Theatre Live, a program from Britain's National Theatre that films stage productions and screens them in cinemas. When the program came to China this year it drew a big response, because the productions it brought were Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and Coriolanus, starring Tom Hiddleston.

Meng Jinghui said he watched one at the Beijing People's Art Theatre and was angry by the halfway point. He scoffs at the whole idea: "What the hell is this? They even boast about how many people it reaches this way. Then just go to the movies, why bother with theater?" He considers it fake fashion.

"If they made it into an art installation, fine. Say, 8 screens, with the actors and a band interacting with them. But really this is watching theater as a video recording, and I think that's a kind of degeneration, a disrespect to theater," Meng Jinghui told QDaily. The company that runs NT Live in China approached the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, which Meng Jinghui founded with Huang Lei and Stan Lai, about screening it there. Meng Jinghui's answer: as long as he is around, it will never be shown.

A still from the play To Live

Meng Jinghui thinks NT does this only because it has some big-name actors. "I've got stars coming out of my ears, and recordings coming out of my ears. From Softness to Amber, from To Live to A Romantic Encounter." Huang Bo, Yuan Quan, Xia Yu, Hu Jun, Hao Lei, Xu Jinglei, Gao Yuanyuan, Tao Hong, Guo Tao, Chen Jianbin, Duan Yihong: many stars have acted in his plays. "Put on a Meng Jinghui star theater showcase, turn it into a film? How ridiculous. I think it's bad, I don't like it, I don't admire it. Some people say, if you don't admire something, don't comment on it. I comment on what I admire, and I have to comment on what I don't admire too."

The exterior of the Beehive Theater in Beijing

Q: QDaily

M: Meng Jinghui

Q: Is spoken drama an entertainment product or a cultural product?

M: Mostly an entertainment product, and partly a cultural product. But spoken drama is, after all, a niche thing, an invitation. It invites a group of people with similar knowledge, education, and taste to come together.

Theater has a lot of entertainment in it, and a lot of culture too. When people want to express themselves, there are bound to be limits of knowledge and taste. It's not like film; film is an industrial product. Spoken drama is a handicraft workshop, a bespoke piece made for your soul. How wonderful is that.

Why worry so much about the audience? I think having an audience is nice, and without one... I'll say it: without an audience I won't die. Without an audience I won't go begging on the street, and even if I did beg, I'd be proud of it. No problem.

Q: Now when people talk about avant-garde theater, they all think of you.

M: That's good, that's great! Whenever people mention avant-garde theater, they say, hey, it's that damn Meng Jinghui, he's taken over the word avant-garde. I think that's great. It took me 20 damn years to take over that word. It wasn't easy. (I'd have thought it's been yours all 20 years.) Right, but I think it's terrific. Sometimes when you say you're an avant-garde theater director, you have nothing left to say to other people. How nice, lots of people stop paying attention to you. And you stop wasting words on people. You just stop wasting words on them. How nice!

Q: Has your work changed?

M: My work from a few years ago is different from my work now. The focus, for instance, the questions you care about. I used to be especially stubborn; now I can look at one thing from many sides.

Also, I'm more intense than before. Back then it wasn't called intensity, it was called anger, but the anger didn't come out as a faint melancholy. Even when I was angry, the tone of my earlier plays was warm, especially warm.

Whether it's Love Is Colder Than Death, The Mermaid by the Dead Water, or Letter from an Unknown Woman, I didn't notice it myself, but other people said, you're getting colder and colder, meaning more and more realistic. Life doesn't have that much warmth. Now I'm less bound up in moral judgment. Now it's more a mix of reality, imagination, and dreams.

Q: Do you know your audience?

M: No. Sometimes I pretend to. But you find there's no way to know. You don't know who your audience is: whether they were born in the 1980s or the 1990s, college graduates or middle schoolers, people who live completely free of restraint or people who are very cautious. You have no idea.

Q: Do you want to know?

M: I don't. Sometimes I pretend to ask how ticket sales are going. But I'm only pretending to want to know. They should get to know me more! Why should I get to know them! They should try harder to understand me.

Q: What do you expect of your audience?

M: When I'm talking to just you, arm around your shoulder and so on, I say it very clearly and very sincerely. But when I face 450,000 people and have to talk to them every day, what do I say? I have to stay sincere, and I need a new aesthetic to keep them coming back as friends, friends who keep growing with us spiritually and culturally. That's what I expect of the audience.

Q: What does commercial theater need?

M: Commercial theater: a good script, a famous director, no, no, you don't need a director. Commercial theater, what does it need a director for? It doesn't. A good script, fairly big-name actors, and a good marketing team are enough. Easy! Very easy!

Q: In your circles, have you met any strange people?

M: No. I think they're all fine, all pretty normal. Mm, no one especially strange. There's a book in Britain, what's it called. When we were making A Romantic Encounter, it was full of really weird people.

I think the strangest person I've met is Shi Hang. Do you know Shi Hang? So strange! Shi Hang is my reading adviser, my private reading adviser. Shi Hang, he, he's so weird. He loves every woman! (Isn't it Zhou Xun he loves?) Everyone except Zhou Xun, he loves. His love is the Jia Baoyu kind, full of kindness.

We went to the Wuzhen Theatre Festival. Afterward he asked me, hey! Any tickets left? Any tickets left? I said, didn't I just give you one? He said some friends of his wanted to see the play. I turned around and there were four women behind him. Four women, right behind him. I said, huh? Are these all your classmates? "No, no, I just met them."

He truly loves women, though whether there's anything more to it I couldn't say, ha. But I find that so strange. And he's very down-to-earth, really simple. How many cats live at his place? 12 cats? (He asks a staff member.) A dozen or so cats live at his place. And there were always two or three women he'd met online staying there. Women from the internet, staying at his place. But that was ten years ago.

Back then we were helping him put together a play. I walked in thinking I had it all sorted. Poof, he kept running off. I didn't know where he'd gone, so I waited at the door. I heard someone say Shi Hang was coming. So I grabbed a cab, straight to his place. You bastard, damn it, why haven't you handed in the script? Hurry up and write. "I'm busy, I promise I'll deliver it tomorrow." No way, I'm staying at your place tonight. So I stayed at his place. I walked in, and three women were there! All strangers, people he'd met online, who had come to Beijing with nothing to do, say someone staying one day and leaving the next. He took them in the way he takes in cats. I don't know whether he has any improper ideas. But he fills the world with love, and I find him really lovable.

Pretty strange, right? Then there's his obsession with cats. And he loves reading. His thing with knowledge: he just talks all day. I'll say, hey hey hey, I'm going to the bathroom. Two minutes, and he says: "Good! Let me read you a line from Graham Greene." I ask what book it is, and he says one he just finished. He can finish a novel in ten minutes. And he can tell you everything essential in it. And he never forgets a story. He's an encyclopedia! He's amazing. If we're talking strange people, next to him I'm a slow elementary-school kid. But of course he doesn't look down on me. He does needle me a lot, though. Ah, you're just lacking something inside. How strange he is, this man. How wonderful. I think he has a world of his own. Shi Hang is a strange person I've met, and a strange person I admire very much.

Q: What are you curious about lately?

M: Me? Lately I'm curious about growing flowers.

I've become really curious about plants lately. Shi Hang gave me a book. It's about plants from the Cultural Revolution era, which were poisonous and which weren't. Back then some families didn't have enough to eat, and people ate poisonous plants and died, so it was a very practical book. (A book that circulated at the time?) Yes. So I find it fascinating.

Every plant has its own habits, each one different. I find that fun. I'm very curious lately.

Q: What kind of people are fun?

M: People who are of one mind with you, people who look a lot like you. That's one kind. People who are like you are fun because you understand them. The other kind looks completely different from you, and by looks I mean their rules for living are completely different. Both kinds are fun. What I dread is the kind that's not too different, vague and blurry.

Q: What is your goal in making theater?

M: My goal is to influence some people in a relaxed way, without too much agonizing. To get some of my ideas into some people's hearts.

Why relaxed, without too much agonizing? Relaxed means less irritable. I used to be far too irritable. Of course I'm still irritable now, plenty irritable. I'm trying, but this is a goal, after all.