Stan Lai (pictured below), the man who was crowned as "Asia's top theatre director" by the Asiaweek and called "the best Chinese language playwright and director in the world" by the BBC recently opened his first theater, Theatre Above, which is in Shanghai.

Located on the fifth floor of Metro City in Xujiahui, the venue is dedicated to Lai's theater works.

The 699-seat venue aims to make theater accessible, with average ticket prices below 300 yuan ($46.81).

Lai described the birth of the theater as "serendipity" for him, as many of his plays are associated with Shanghai in a very deep way.

Over the past three decades, Lai and his Performance Workshop in Taiwan have presented unforgettable shows across the world.

The opening season for Theatre Above kicked off last Friday and carries on until the end of February.

It will show six famed plays by Lai, Sand on a Distant Star, A Servant of Two Masters, Mumble Jumble, Crosstalk Travelers, A Blurry Kind of Love, and Just Play It.

A number of popular TV and film stars such as Cheng Pei-pei from Hong Kong, Chen Chia-hwa (aka Ella in the girls' pop group SHE) from Taiwan, and Dai Jun from the Chinese mainland will join the opening season.

Theatre Above has also recruited 14 actors from the Chinese mainland.

The Global Times talked with Lai about his vision of his new venue and the wider theater scene in China.

GT: What's your long-term plan for Theatre Above?

Lai: It's continual. The six plays are also sort of tests to see how the audience will react. There are so many ways to run Theatre Above, one will be a rotating repertoire of different plays, one will be, let's say, one play becomes a hit and you just keep playing it for two months, three months, or even six months, who knows.

So we really don't know what's going to happen, we do have many plays in our repertoire that we have not restaged. There must be 50 to 60 plays that have all been tested by the market before that we just never got back to. So we have a huge repertoire of plays that we can bring out.

What really intrigues me is the opportunity to make new plays here with our own company in our own building. We have plans to do a children's play in the summer, which is brand-new. And once we have our theater here, there is so much we can do in terms of outreach and educational programs.

So I'm looking forward to the day when Shanghai middle school, high school and even elementary school students come to here for special performances just for them.

Famed theater director Stan Lai recently opens his own venue in Shanghai (above). Photos: CFP

GT: With the practice of Theatre Above, will you switch your focus from Taiwan to the mainland?

Lai: Our group still performs a lot in Taiwan, doing new plays. The recent one, A Blurry Kind of Love, has been extremely successful and it's coming to Theatre Above. But I have given most of my duties in Taiwan to Ismene Ting, so she is now the artistic director there.

Of course, we're one entity, we work closely together. In America, this year we did Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for 80 performances, which was very successful.

And next year I have two new projects in America, so I'll be spending more time there. I also have to work a lot with our Beijing producer, Magnificent Culture, for new productions.

So it's splitting my time basically between Shanghai, America, Beijing and a little time in Taiwan.

GT: Compared with theater in Taiwan, does the Chinese mainland have any special charm for you?

Lai: I think it's the diversity and vastness of the Chinese mainland. I think Taiwan has its extremely special character that is very conducive to creativity.

I think as an artist in Taiwan, there is nothing to hold you back. You can perform, you can write about anything in any way, and nobody is looking over your shoulder. You're dealing with unfettered freedom, I think it's good, but then you have to know how to use that unfettered freedom.

On the Chinese mainland, I think you don't get that, but you get a wealth of humanity and stories.

These stories are different from the stories in Taiwan. And I think young artists on the mainland haven't even started to tap the surface of all these stories, because I often get the sentiment that "oh, there is censorship here, we can't do anything" and I say you can do so much. You're just not going to write about a few things, but there are millions of things you can write about, and they're all important.

Over all these years, I have come to realize that we're not historians, but in a way we are, we're writing the emotional history of people, of an era. We're writing the cultural history of a whole era. And this is important, this is what people should understand, this is what people should be doing.

GT: Your works have been performed on the mainland for the past two decades. What changes have you witnessed in audience here?

Lai: I think the audience certainly have grown a lot, incredibly, and when we do theater outside Beijing and Shanghai, you can feel they are growing and changing, they're more sophisticated they know more and they expect more, this is all great.

It's just that for me I feel that the production side, the creative part has not grown as well as the audience has. The audience demands more and more sophisticated work, not more and more mindless work, which is what some people think. They think that you get people laugh and they just forget about their lives for two hours.

I don't think that is what theater does. I think you should leave the theater with more nutrition to face your life, and more deeper things to think about, and that's why you go to a theater. You don't go to become shallower, so I think this is where the creative side in China needs to work harder.