The National Drama Festival 2023 opened at the Beijing Comedy Theatre on November 29, 2023. Photo: Courtesy of Beijing Comedy Theatre

The National Drama Festival 2023 has recently wrapped up at the Beijing Comedy Theatre. 

The festival aims to promote the creative transformation and innovative development of Chinese drama, gather local drama resources and strength, and build an important platform for the industry. 

Since its first edition in 2017, the festival has been held five times. So far, it has selected more than 230 quality plays from across the country to perform in Beijing. 

The festival will link up with more than 10 cities, such as Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenzhen and Nanjing, and will tour 23 plays. 

The Chinese version of Les Misérables, adapted from the masterpiece of French literature by Victor Hugo and produced by Yanghua Drama, will be performed, as will the original play How Are You, the drama The Protagonist, the children's play The Cat God in the Forbidden City and other quality plays. 

The festival will run until January 2024. It will cooperate with the Central Academy of Drama for the first time, and invite well-known drama experts, scholars, educators, and artists from the academic and industry circles to conduct dialogue activities around the theme of "the drama landscape of the city."

At the event site, the opening play The Taste of Life aroused an enthusiastic response from the audience. The play portrays the reunion of four generations of a family who have lived on the two sides of the Taiwan Straits over the past 70 years. 

Tang Lihua, deputy head of the drama troupe of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and producer and lead actor of The Taste of Life, said it was an honor to be part of "the opening play of the National Drama Festival 2023. We hope to take this opportunity to let the audience sense the changes of the past 70 years and feel the culture of Beijing."

Global Times