On 5 and 6 October, the youth version of “Outpost” was staged at the STA Experimental Theatre.
Jointly produced by Shanghai Theatre Academy, Shanghai Longhua Martyrs' Memorial Park (Longhua Martyrs' Memorial Hall) and Shanghai Foundation for Supporting the Military and Families, the large-scale original drama “Outpost” was created in 2021, the centenary of the birth of the Communist Party of China, and premiered on 7 February of that year, which was the 90th anniversary of the deaths of Rou Shi and the other martyrs of the "Chinese Left-wing Writers League".
Since then, "Outpost" has gone through many rounds of performances and toured to Zhejiang and Jiangsu, and has also been made into an 8K film.
For “Outpost”, most of the main actors in the previous rounds of performances were alumni of STA. The most important feature of the youth version of "Outpost" is that all the roles in the play are played by students and teachers of STA.
The role of Lu Xun in this version was still played by Wang Luoyong, the leader of the musical theatre discipline at STA and the artistic director of “Outpost”. Under the leadership and guidance of Wang Luoyong, students from different grades of STA’s Musical Theatre Centre took on the important task of playing the roles of the five young writers of the Chinese Left-wing Writers League and other important roles, and all teachers of the Musical Theatre Centre were also involved, acting as either assistant directors or coordinators.
In the youth version of "Outpost", the age of the actors was closer to that of the five martyrs of the Chinese Left-wing Writers League in history. Lin Mo, the student who played the role of Yin Fu is even at the same age as Yin Fu at the time of his death, both of them being 21 years old. The performance of “Outpost” with the main cast being post-00s presented a magnificent song of youth for the 74th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Since its release, “Outpost” has not only won the first prize for best script at the 36th Tian Han Drama Awards, but has also been selected as one of the beneficiaries of the 2021 Shanghai Culture-Education Integration Support Program and the 2020 Shanghai Cultural Development Foundation Major Literary and Artistic Creation Projects, and has also been listed as a project of the Ministry of Education's "2023 Excellent Original Cultural Works in Colleges and Universities".
It is reported that the youth version of "Outpost" will also be staged at the Peking University Centennial Lecture Hall and other venues for a series of touring activities.
