A night in which a theater director had a few too many continues to have its denouement in a town of charms

Huang Lei's moment of enlightenment came at a dinner with friends. It was 12 years ago, so memories of what they ate that evening in Beijing have no doubt been lost to time, but Huang knows exactly what they drank - copious amounts of alcohol - and by the end of the convivial gathering he was well and truly drunk.

As he and his friends continued to imbibe and chatter away, sharp images of the town of Wuzhen, 1,270 kilometers away in Zhejiang province, began to float through Huang's mind.

Wuzhen's renown is built on the watery setting of part of the town, crossed and crisscrossed by picturesque bridges, canals, rivers and lakes, with traditional architecture that hearkens back to the town's ancient beginnings.

It was in 2003 that Huang, an actor and film director, discovered Wuzhen's charms and was instantly smitten with them, and at that Beijing dinner he imagined the town as a giant stage - a setting for a theater festival.

"What about setting up a theater training center or a theater festival in Wuzhen?" Huang, then teaching at the Beijing Film Academy, blurted out to his dinner companions, with the enthusiasm of someone experiencing a eureka moment.

"You can say or do silly things when you have had too much to drink," Huang says now, "so I really didn't take my own idea that seriously. On the other hand, after that I could never quite shake off the idea and was constantly thinking about it."

Huang would have plenty of opportunities to do just that, because after arriving in Wuzhen for the first time, to direct and star in a TV series called Lost Time, he opened a bar in the town named after the series, and he was a frequent visitor.

Inevitably Huang, 48, who rose to fame by playing the leading role in the 1990 film Life on a String, directed by Chen Kaige, began seriously to talk with theater directors and scriptwriters, including Stan Lai and Meng Jinghui, about a theater festival in the water town. Eventually the first Wuzhen Theater Festival was staged, in 2013, with Lai's eight-hour epic A Dream Like a Dream acting as the curtain-raiser.

Eight indoor venues have been built since then, each within walking distance from one another and all exuding the attractiveness of the old water town. There are also outdoor public spaces designed for performance. Forums, workshops and street performances also give the town a carnival atmosphere during the festival.

The festival's seventh edition will be held from Oct 25 to Nov 3, with more than 140 performances by theater companies from 13 countries, including Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece and Japan.

The festival's slogan ru huan ru xi Wuzhen(Beyond the real, all Wuzhen's a stage) conveys its aspirations to create "dreamy and surreal experiences". The aim is to present to the public international theatrical works and to offer young talent a platform from which to start their careers.

"We have built a beautiful shell, and with these great theatrical productions, we fill in the shell with culture," Huang says. "What began as a crazy idea has been turned into a reality."

The 28 theatrical productions to be staged during the festival were selected by a group of theater directors, scriptwriters, actors and critics, including the actors Zhou Xun and Pu Cunxin, led by the theater director Meng Jinghui.

"Wuzhen Theater Festival is where international theater artists meet, so we invite artists who can bring vitality to the contemporary theater scene," Meng says. "For the audience it can be an aesthetic adventure because some of the works are avant-garde and thought-provoking."

Meng's take on Teahouse, based on the original by the novelist and playwright Lao She (1899-1966), received mixed reviews when it opened last year's festival.

This July, Teahouse was staged during the Fete d'Avignon, the 73-year-old annual contemporary performing arts event in southern France.

The theme of this year's festival is yong, or emerge, Meng said, and the 28 works are divided into five categories: master surge, classical vortex, avant-garde tsunami, innovation undertow and academic ripple.

The opening play is Three Sisters, directed by Yury Butusov and based on Anton Chekhov's work of the same title. The four-hour play will be performed by St. Petersburg Lensovet Academic Theater.

For Butusov, regarded as one of the foremost directors on the contemporary Russian stage, it will be his first time working in China, where he is familiar to many people thanks to his work The Seagull, a performance of which was recorded by Stage Russia HD at the Satirikon Theater in Moscow and screened in China last year.

At this year's festival the London-born and Paris-based director Peter Brook will present his new production, Why?, written and directed by him and his longtime partner Marie-Helene Estienne.

Brook, regarded as one of the greatest living theater directors, is well-known among Chinese dramatists partly because of his books such as The Empty Space, about theater, which has been translated into 15 languages and appears on many must-read lists.

In his new production Brook answers a series of questions such as "Why theater?" "What's it for?" and "What's it about?"

Other international highlights will include The Tree, directed by Eugenio Barba and performed by the Odin Teatret, founded by Barba in Oslo, Norway, in 1964, and Shakespeare's Macbeth, directed by the Italian Alessandro Serra and performed by Sardegna Teatro of Sardinia.

The 125-year-old Berliner Ensemble, one of the most renowned and long-standing theaters in Germany, will make its debut in China during the festival, by staging Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, directed by Michael Thalheimer, from Nov 1 to 3.

The festival co-founder Lai will present his latest work, One One Zero Eight, at Wuzhen Grand Theater on Oct 29.

The play, which premiered in June, is a time travel story about an internet novelist, Shu Tong, who seeks inspiration for her new novel about spies and meets a real spy during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45).

It is Lai's 39th original work as playwright and director, and his fourth performed at the Wuzhen Theater Festival, and it features Ni Ni, the actress who made her name in the Flowers of War, directed by Zhang Yimou.

One of the most popular outdoor venues in Wuzhen is Water Theater, which can hold an audience of more than 2,000. Performances are viewed across water, with ancient buildings in the background, framed by the ruins of a broken bridge and the Bailian Pagoda in the distance.

Two plays will be staged there, The Trojan Women, directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos and Attis Theater, which the director founded in Greece and focuses on researching ancient Greek tragedy, and The Fairy Queen, directed and written by Michal Znaniecki from Poland and based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Both works will involve water screens and projections.

"For me, it's like a dream come true," says Huang, adding that one of his favorite places in Wuzhen is a basketball court near where he lives during the festival every year.

"Every year, I stay in this small town, which separates me from my busy life in Beijing. It's like a spiritual therapy. In the morning I play basketball, and after lunch I go and watch a theater or street play. Wuzhen is becoming better known not just as a tourist attraction but because people are being drawn here to watch plays when the festival is on."

In addition to other duties in Wuzhen, Huang is director of the festival's Young Theater Artist's Competition, which aims to uncover young theater talent and spur interest in theater among young people.

There are 18 finalists in this year's competition, selected from hundreds of applications that were taken from May.

After graduating with a master's degree of acting from the Beijing Film Academy in 1997, Huang taught there until early this year.

"As a teacher I love to see young people perform on stage, and working with the competition during the festival has been really encouraging. It's here that young directors are born."

Some of the young people who started their theater careers in Wuzhen have gone on to be successful theater directors, he says.

One such is Wang Chong. His latest work, Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going 2.0?, will be staged during this year's festival. There are no professional or trained actors and just four audience members, each of whom plays a character, guided by audio directions in what they do or say.

Teachers and students from Central Academy of Drama, Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, and Nanjing University of the Arts will also stage works during the festival.

Given how small Wuzhen is, it is not unlikely that over that time they and many others at the festival will somewhere knock into Huang, the man whose drunken reverie 12 years ago made it all possible.

"People knock into me in restaurants or see me outside sitting on a public bench during the afternoon, but I'm not treated like a celebrity," Huang says.

"The thing that draws us all here is a great theatrical experience. In fact people come to Wuzhen - in its theaters, along waterways and in its narrow streets - for one thing: to dream."