“Meng”, or “The Commoner”, is excerpted from The Book of Songs, and tells a story from a young woman falling in love with Meng, getting married, and being abandoned – a classic story of “the lovesick woman and heartbreaking man”. The poem takes the perspective of the young woman, and heavily criticizes the morals of the man.
In the autumn of 2020, our 10th grade students studied this poem, and we discussed the effect of perspective on narrating a story, asking them to switch points of view and come up with new creative versions of the story. Students created many new stories, changing the soliloquy into a dialogue or third person narrative, and using this as a basis to a drama performed on the 2021 China Day of THIS.
The script uses dialogue as the main narrative mode, and the man’s voice is brought into the story. The moral criticism stance of the original poem is downplayed in favor of exploring the causes of the tragedy from the perspective of their “relationship” itself. Due to the change in narrative mode, the writers have creatively incorporated many modern observations into the presentation of the causes of the conflict between the two, showing a deep reflection on the relationship between the characters in the real world. The stage design also takes into account the compactness of the conflict presentation, setting different time and space scenes on the same stage, and presenting the conflict transition through the stage station design and lighting switching, making the whole play full of modern sense. The lines are deliberately written in a way that avoids the everyday expressions of the parents, and the language is full of poetic power, showing a strong dramatic tension.