Finding his own way

Scenes from Cosi, an adaptation from Australian playwright Louis Nowra's popular stage production of 1992. The Chinese version is theater-loving Tong Xinyu's debut directoral work. [Photo by He Buzhi/China Daily]

"Although the story is set in 1971, the play is relevant today. It has a lot of laughs, but it's also serious," says the 27-year-old Tong, who played one of the roles when Graves adapted Cosi in early 2014 in Beijing.

In Graves' version, the play was in English, while Tong has translated the script to stage it in Chinese. For Tong, the most challenging part was to localize the humor and irony, and to bridge the cultural differences.

Tong also altered the relationship between patients and how they evolve in the course of the opera.

"Tong created a very successful production of his own working with his young but talented cast. I was very proud of him and his work," says Graves, who watched the play in May. "He has worked with me for some time, but I no longer consider him a student of mine but a colleague－I would be happy to get advice from him on work I do."

Graves notes that China's theater scene has opened up to a much wider variety of approaches over the last few years, and more Western plays are being translated to Chinese and performed here.

"Tong and other young theater artists can make a career from the arts in China. There is a big enough market already for that," says Graves, who expects it to grow even more.

One of the reasons Tong chose Cosi as his first directorial work was that he felt connected to the characters. "We might not be mentally ill but we all have some crazy experiences," he says.

The craziest moment Tong had was when he watched a drama performed by a group of students in Zhejiang University. The drama was based on Beijing People's Art Theater's classic work, Hua Bian, which was adapted from The Caine Mutiny, a 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk.