On May 13, 1939, a vessel set sail from Hamburg for Cuba with 937 German-Jewish refugees, following the violence of Kristallnacht. The refugees were denied entry to Cuba and then they had to sail from port to port, hoping to find a country that would accept them.

This event inspired Israeli playwright and director Hanoch Levin (1943-99) to write a play, which, instead of a historic piece, turned out to be a poetic and dreamy piece, entitled The Child Dreams.

Premiered in 1993, The Child Dreams was first staged as a joint production by Habima National Theatre, the Haifa Theater and the Israel Festival, and was directed by Levin himself.

The play will make its debut in China with two shows on Nov 16 and 17 at the Tianqiao Performing Arts Center in Beijing, as part of the ongoing third Lao She Theatre Festival, which celebrates the legacy of the renowned Chinese writer Lao She (1899-1966) with international theater productions staged in the capital from Sept 19 to Nov 23.

The play, presented by the National Theatre of Bitola and directed by Israel-born artist Itai Doron, is the version of The Child Dreams done by the National Theatre of Bitola which premiered on Jan 26.

The play opens with a family at home, where a father, a mother and a little child live. The parents lovingly watch the sleeping child when suddenly war breaks out. The story then showcases the journey of the mother and her child to find asylum after the father is killed. They then go into exile in a distant land where they beg for safe shelter.

Director Doron, who was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and is also a film director and photographer, first read the script of The Child Dreams when he was in high school.

Speaking about the play, he says: "Hanoch Levin was an icon for me since I grew up dreaming of being in theater. The script strikes you hard, it totally stuns you.

"The thing I most strongly remember is that I thought the play was powerfully written that it was a difficult mission to put it on stage."

When it came to putting the play on stage, the first idea that came to Omri Rosenblum - the visual director and Doron's artistic partner - and Doron was about using the ocean as the basic landscape for the stage.

Explaining the background for the idea, Doron says: "In Israel, there is this game played by children called Yam-Yabasha (meaning: Sea-Land). In this game kids jump between two sides separated by a rope on the floor. If they get confused they are out of the game. And the ocean is a big part of this play, and of the real historical event in 1939. It is also a painful part of the current imagery of the refugee crisis in Europe and the world. So we knew that we needed to put an ocean on the stage somehow."

In the play, the main aim of Doron and the artistic team is to get the audience into a dreamlike state. So he uses live video as the lens of the child so the audience can see his dream through the video.

He adds that the most challenging part of directing the play is to find a way to portray its powerful words.

"When you read the play for the first time, it seems like everything is being said, that there is nothing hidden. It's like a dream, where everything is being put out with beautiful poetry. So, how do you turn this poetry into drama, into conflict, and into life?"

The Child Dreams is the first time Doron is working with a Levin script, though it's his fourth directorial production.

The lead actress Katerina Anevska Drangovska in Doron's version of The Child Dreams was in the original production of the play directed by Levin himself, which enabled Doron to hear stories about the writer.

Levin, one of the most original and most innovative writers of his generation, wrote plays, sketches, songs, stories and poetry, and directed most of his own plays. He died of cancer at the age of 55 in 1999, leaving 56 plays, two books of prose, two collections of sketches and songs, a book of poems and two books for children.

Chinese audiences are familiar with Levin since his play, Requiem, made its debut in China at the National Theater of China in 2004. In 2006 and 2012, the play returned to the country, and the reception it got was overwhelming.

In 2013, Levin's play, The Suitcase Packers, a comedy about eight funerals, was staged at the Capital Theater in Beijing to commemorate what would have been Levin's 70th birthday.

In July 2019, a Chinese version of Requiem premiered in Beijing, marking the first Chinese language adaptation of Levin's plays, and it was directed by Israeli director Yair Sherman and featured Chinese actress Sun Li and veteran Chinese actor Ni Dahong.

Speaking about the performance ahead of the premiere, Lilian Barreto, Levin's widow, who was in Beijing, said: "Levin was a great storyteller with his sharp, painful and honest works."

As how Doron feels about presenting Levin's work in China, he says: "It's very exciting to think about all the different cultures that will gather in China. It's totally crazy and so beautiful that art can achieve this.

"It will be the first time in China for me and I truly believe that in the land of the childhood, and in the land of dreams - which this play is about - we all meet. The audience can expect a different kind of journey inside the theater, a dream that takes place inside a theater. And like all of the shows I've done, the audience members are not only observers; they are part of the composition. They are dreamers but also a part of the dream."