Theaters told to play nice

At first glance, the two people singing on the small, worn-out Beijing stage seemed innocent enough, but as their performance reached a crescendo, smiles and bursts of laughter erupted from the audience. The voices of the performers rang out with the slang and accent of Northeast China, but a careful listener could pick out the subtext within their words.

Between the lines of their discussion, the innuendo portrayed a startlingly graphic description of clumsy sex between two newlyweds.

The fate of small, avant-garde plays like this may be in doubt after the Beijing government announced it would be making anonymous inspections of certain performances deemed to be out of touch with community standards.

Plays in small, amateur theaters that "threaten the country's interests, incite ethnic hatred or promote pornography or violence" will be the target of anonymous volunteer inspectors dispatched by neighborhood administration offices and residential communities in Beijing in a bid to clean up the industry, according to a report published on the website of the Beijing government early this month.

The Global Times made a number of enquiries to the culture bureau over several days, but did not receive a reply by press time.

Vulgarity targeted

The theaters targeted by the decree are known as "mini theaters." As Cui Ning, a vice president of the Beijing People's Art Theater explained, these mini theater plays are not defined by their size but their content, which should be cutting-edge and experimental.

The report did not stipulate why these mini theaters are being subject to increased scrutiny - especially given the fact that theoretically, all plays should already have provided scripts to cultural authorities for screening.

Mini theaters have long been in the spotlight, and accused by the authorities of being out of touch with community standards. Wang Xiaoying, a vice president of the National Theater of China, said in a seminar on mini theaters in 2012 that statistics show that more than 50 percent of some 350 plays performed in Beijing in 2010 and 2011 were considered to have had insufficient investment, be of poor quality or be vulgar, the People's Daily reported.

At the end of that year, 33 mini theaters and production teams in Beijing issued a code of conduct for the industry, which emphasized self-discipline in resisting vulgarity, according to a report in qianlong.com, which pointed out that this was the first code of its kind in the city.

This is not the first time the bureau has organized volunteer inspectors to investigate mini theaters. In May 2012, the bureau organized 60 inspectors, consisting of college students and officials, to inspect mini theaters after they had been given a few weeks of training. A public hotline was also established to report on improper performances. However, the outcome, if any, of these inspections remains mysterious.

Ren Yuan, the manager of Fengchao Theater in Beijing, told the Global Times on Sunday that he was informed by the bureau at that time that the inspectors would visit his theaters, but he did not know when they came.