In the avenues and alleyways

New play about old hutong marks the first stage adaptation of classic Liu Xinwu novel, Chen Nan reports.

It is morning on Dec 12, 1982. A courtyard, hidden in a narrow hutong in downtown Beijing, is about to get busy.

It's the day Xue Jiyue and Pan Xiuya are getting married. Xue's mother, Auntie Xue, is determined to give her son a perfect wedding and tries to keep everything moving forward smoothly.

The wedding brings lots of guests to the party, however, small things seem to go wrong. The young couple is hardly a romantic ideal. At 25 years old, they both have the idea of what finding a "partner" means, but the word "love" never crosses their minds. The guests also have their own stories, especially those who cause the disturbance.

With the Xue family wedding as its fulcrum, Chinese writer Liu Xinwu paints a vivid picture of the lives of local residents in Beijing in the early 1980s in his award-winning novel, Zhong Gu Lou (Bell and Drum Towers).