CAO Yu (1910 - 1996), one of China's greatest dramatists, did not speak English in his teenage years when his high school teacher handed him a copy of The Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen (1828 - 1906) was the father of realist drama, whose form and structure we take for granted in TV shows and films today.

Cao had to read the plays with the help of an English dictionary. But they left a lasting impression on him and influenced him to be a playwright. Cao would go on to write a number of "spoken theatre" masterpieces in China which forever changed the way theatre is practised in the country.

Last weekend, the Beijing People's Art Theatre staged one of his famous plays, Savage Land (1937), at the Esplanade Theatre. The influences of Ibsen, William Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill are evident in the play's fantastical and expressionist elements. But its core themes remain Cao's specific and humanist concerns about the social particularities of village life in a part of China.