For China's acclaimed stage director Meng Jinghui, the goal he set for his future career development is to "venture to fail" as much as he could.

Of course, he was referring to his artistic creations, not the success of the productions. As a leading avant-garde drama director in China, the influential 35-year-old Meng is determined to pursue his artistic vision with no fear of failure. It is the same courage that convinced him to bring his production of playwright Liao Yimei's Rhinoceros in Love to southern China, an area with which he is totally unfamiliar.

Luckily, despite all the controversies and disagreement over his avant-garde plays, the veteran director hasn't encountered any real failure in the past 10 years — not in the culturally centered cities of Bejing and Shanghai, and now not in the economically developed southern city of Shenzhen.

Last weekend the popular director embraced acclaim from Shenzheners for Rhinoceros in Love, with two successive shows at the Shenzhen Grand Theater.

Both nights audiences, which included high school students, middle-aged theatergoers and government officials such as Shenzhen Acting Mayor Li Hongzhong, filled the 1,000-seat theater nearly to capacity.

Though theater productions aren't unusual here, none to date have garnered such wide attention.

For most of the audience it was Meng's reputation as the flag-carrier for China's young dramatists and the outstanding record of Rhinoceros in Love, which was staged 70 times before it came to Shenzhen, that drew them. Still others were there to ponder what exactly the state of experimental drama is in China today.

Meng didn't let his audiences down. His trademark sarcasm and black humor , his thought-provoking statements woven in poetic language, together with the bold use of music, light and settings, crushed the image of traditional drama for his audience.

"I didn't know that drama could be done in this way. This is totally different from what we've been taught to know," a woman excitedly told Meng in an after-show meeting.

He smiled and replied: "That is what we want to bring to you."

But many in the audience were touched by the story itself, which tells the story about a rhinoceros trainer named Ma Lu who loves a woman who doesn't love him in return.

"The drama stirs up all the feelings inside me. It brought me back to the old days when I pursued my innocent love, and it saddened me when I realized that few of us can struggle and persist and pursue and love as the hero did," said an unnamed middle-aged man after the show.

Some of Meng's audiences left the theater with tears, some with smiles and some with complex feelings. But the show's sponsor, the Shenzhen Performance Company, left with great satisfaction, even if the company failed to financially profit from the performances.

"But Meng managed to attract so many young people to the theater and the play got such a good response from the audiences — that is our biggest success," said Huang Aigao, manager of the Shenzhen Performance Company.

Huang said the company will introduce more dramas by younger Chinese directors, like Meng Jinghui, to Shenzhen audiences.

"Drama is a unique form of art with powerful expression. It's totally different from music and dancing. We will bring more dramas to Shenzhen to provide the locals with wider creative choices," said Huang.

(Xinhua News Agency November 19, 2003)