Catch daring theatre in an ancient water town at this month's Wuzhen Theatre Festival

In reimagining this Lao She classic, China’s hugely influential theatremaker Meng Jinghui has cast four directors as his main actors who help him shape the show’s direction. Traditionally, China’s teahouses saw cross-sections of society meeting to play out human dramas; Lao’s story chronicles characters such as a eunuch, a slave girlturned- waitress, a one-time Manchu noble who now sells vegetables, a fortune-teller and an opium addict. If Meng has a signature, it is slick, hip shows featuring attractive young performers doubling as rock musicians, so his take on this period piece is anyone’s guess. But it will be memorable. In Chinese with Chinese and English surtitles.

The most important experimental theatre collective to emerge from China, Paper Tiger Theater Studio has spent two decades gracing international festivals and amassing eager collaborators. In this multilingual co-production (with Chinese and English surtitles) with Thalia Theatre Hamburg and the Goethe Institut, among others, director Tian Gebing presents a work inspired by Kafka’s Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, which describes the Great Wall as the ultimate in collective construction that defies space and time. Gebing sets this ancient achievement against the country’s modern ambitions, and alongside the view from Europe, both yesterday and today.

Mustard gas, trenches, the Archduke Ferdinand – the Great War may have propelled combat into the modern age, but even these horrors were soon eclipsed by other wars to end all wars, and memories began to fade. But writer/director Alexander Molochnikov and the Moscow Art Theatre bring them roaring back. Based on diaries and letters of French and German soldiers, 19.14 (in Russian with Chinese and English surtitles) uses the raucous, coarse and often witty genre of cabaret to present stories of youths eager for adventure who were soon drowning in mud, disease and death. A creative take on the first forgotten war.

Modern society’s greatest conundrum? How to preserve the old while embracing the new. Director Héctor Flores Komatsu looks at Mexico’s indigenous youth through their personal stories, ancestral myths and traditional arts. This provides context for their current struggles with land usurpation, violence, community resistance and ancestral duties, as ‘progress’ clashes with tradition. In Spanish with Chinese and English surtitles.

Writer and director Napo Masheane takes us behind the scenes at a South African jazz club where five full-figured singers talk about food, relationships, prejudice and how they finally learned to love their fabulous bodies. In stories told through dialogue and song, this is a peek at a seldom-seen sisterhood that is both distant and utterly relatable. In Sotho, Zulu, Xhosa and English with Chinese and English surtitles.

An immigrant factory-worker is racing against time; her eyesight is deteriorating, but since her son has the same condition, her earnings go toward his surgery. Her only solace comes in the sunny, glamorous world of MGM musicals, where darkness doesn’t exist. But when a neighbour steals her precious savings, the fantasy turns deadly. Based on Lars von Trier’s 2000 film, director Bastian Kraft’s stage version (in German with English and Chinese surtitles) uses complex lighting designs to immerse audiences in a similar state of encroaching blindness. Presented by Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre.