Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Sound of Music tours several Chinese cities, attracting legions of children to the performances. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Cities like Beijing and Shanghai can arrange a dozen or two shows into a festival every month if they want to. And indeed the 6th Theater Olympics, held in Beijing through November and December, incorporated many existing shows in its lineup. But the core of its programming was filled with plays that were conceived by the festival's founders.

Names such as Tadashi Suzuki and Robert Wilson had been drummed into theater students in China, who had never seen their actual stagings－until now. The result was shocking: The treatments were so different from the style familiar to audiences that some expressed their discomfort in very unpleasant ways.

One student who attended a performance of Suzuki's Cyrano de Bergerac asked the Japanese master if his directorial approach amounted to "blasphemy". And during a performance of Robert Wilson's staging of Krapp's Last Tape, there was almost an audience revolt as swear words were hurled at the stage where Wilson himself was giving a solo performance of Samuel Beckett's play.

People openly questioned whether the revered foreign artists were simply being "too pretentious". At the Wilson show, organizers even checked every mobile gadget to make sure they were turned off, but it started almost half an hour late, a sign of lack of respect for the audience according to some.

Then the performance itself, starting with a 15-minute eating of bananas, puzzled many and angered some. The ensuing debate among China's theaterati may be the most fruitful: It pointed to the Chinese preference of realism in theater, which was imported from the Russian school of Stanislavski and elevated to the pantheon of tradition through a century of practice.