Some productions reveal their intentions only after the narrative unfolds. City of Fiction does the opposite. Before the performance even begins, director Lin Baihong quietly tells the audience what kind of theatre they are about to experience.

Suspended high above the auditorium is an oversized synopsis of the play, held aloft by two enormous hands. Loudspeakers hang in midair. On the beach outside, children continue playing as if nothing extraordinary is about to happen. The image is startling in its simplicity. There is no elaborate symbolism, no deliberate obscurity, no attempt to disguise its theatricality beneath layers of conceptual sophistication. Instead, the director establishes, with remarkable clarity, that this evening will be about one thing: the pursuit of wonder.

The opening sound arrives almost imperceptibly—a small horn, followed by the amplified cry of a gull. The natural sound is enlarged until it overwhelms the entire space. It no longer feels like the cry of a bird but something older, almost mythological, a force that exceeds human presence. Before any story has begun, the audience is already placed within a landscape where reality and imagination begin to dissolve into one another.

What follows reinforces this intention. A magician’s illusion unfolds: a performer is locked inside a box, lifted into the air, only for the box to descend empty while the performer slowly walks in from elsewhere. The trick itself is hardly unprecedented. What is astonishing is not the illusion but the confidence with which it is presented. The director never seems interested in deceiving the audience. Instead, the illusion functions as a declaration of artistic purpose. Theatre, the production suggests, remains one of the few places where the impossible can still be treated as something ordinary.

This desire to rediscover mystery becomes the emotional foundation of the entire performance.

Structurally, City of Fiction is remarkably straightforward. It unfolds in two clearly defined movements. The first follows the search for Xiaomei; the second shifts toward Xiaomei—or perhaps Lin Baihong herself—recounting the life she wishes she had lived. The simplicity of this architecture proves to be one of the production’s greatest strengths. Rather than relying upon increasingly complicated dramaturgy, the work allows imagination to grow naturally from a clear and open framework.

Paradoxically, it is once the narrative begins in earnest that the production becomes less immediately captivating. Stories inevitably invite comparison. As soon as characters emerge and dramatic situations develop, audiences begin placing the work within existing theatrical traditions. Yet even within this more recognizable narrative territory, the production refuses conventional realism.

The children playing on the beach never completely disappear. The stage remains suspended somewhere between reality and dream, preserving the openness established before the first scene. This refusal to abandon the surrounding world is one of the production’s most quietly radical decisions. Rather than sealing the audience inside a fictional universe, the performance allows everyday life to coexist with theatrical illusion.

The result is a stage that never entirely belongs to either world.

As Lin Baihong’s narration gradually unfolds, language itself begins to lose its solidity. Her words become increasingly elusive, almost hypnotic, dissolving certainty instead of producing it. The audience slowly enters a state where physical reality no longer feels entirely reliable. This growing sense of disorientation is never frightening. Instead, it resembles one of life’s most familiar experiences: knowing that something profound has happened while remaining unable to explain why.

Birth.

Death.

Love.

Memory.

These defining moments often resist explanation. They occur, they transform us, and afterwards we are left only with their emotional residue.

Perhaps this is precisely the condition City of Fiction seeks to recreate.

Equally remarkable is the director’s extraordinary awareness of space. Throughout the performance, attention constantly shifts beyond the performers themselves. A small monitor quietly displays thermal images or aerial footage captured by drones. Cameras, projections, and architectural details all remain active participants within the theatrical composition. Nothing exists merely as decoration. Every element contributes to an expanded spatial consciousness.

This reveals something essential about the director’s philosophy.

Theatre is not simply something performed for spectators. It is something created together with them.

Rather than ignoring the audience’s presence, the production continually acknowledges it. Watching and being watched become reciprocal conditions. Cameras observe performers, projections observe space, spectators observe both, while simultaneously becoming part of the environment being observed. The performance creates not simply a stage but an ecology of perception in which every participant shares responsibility for constructing the theatrical event.

This sense of collective presence distinguishes City of Fiction from many contemporary multimedia productions. Technology never functions as visual ornamentation. Projection, live video, surveillance imagery, and cinematic language are integrated because they expand the audience’s experience of space and time.

The production’s most astonishing achievement arrives through its handling of moving images.

Over the course of nearly ninety minutes, prerecorded footage, live cameras, handheld cinematography, and projected images coexist across multiple visual perspectives. Rather than fragmenting the audience’s attention, these simultaneous viewpoints deepen the complexity of perception itself. We begin to understand that reality is never singular. Every event generates multiple truths depending upon where one stands.

When Lin Baihong searches for Xiaomei, the camera quietly follows her into the library. The unstable handheld footage, increasingly distorted colors, and the gradual arrival of darkness produce an overwhelming sense of unreality. Yet this unreality never undermines emotional credibility. On the contrary, it strengthens it.

The audience gradually stops asking whether Xiaomei can actually be found.

Instead, the search itself becomes the destination.

What matters is no longer the answer but the persistence of the question.

This transformation—from solving a mystery to inhabiting one—may be the production’s greatest accomplishment.

Theatre has long attempted to represent reality. City of Fiction seems more interested in representing uncertainty. It recognizes that the deepest human experiences rarely conclude with clarity. We search without certainty of success. We love without certainty of being loved. We remember without certainty that memory itself is accurate.

In this sense, fiction becomes strangely more truthful than documentation.

The production ultimately succeeds because it never mistakes ambiguity for obscurity. Its mysteries remain emotionally accessible even when intellectually unresolved. The audience is not asked to decipher hidden meanings but to remain open to states of perception that resist immediate explanation.

That generosity feels increasingly rare.

In an era saturated by information, algorithms, and endless interpretation, City of Fiction quietly argues that not everything meaningful can—or should—be explained. Some experiences deserve to remain mysterious. Some questions become richer precisely because they cannot be answered.

Perhaps that is why the opening image lingers long after the performance ends: the giant synopsis suspended above the audience, the children playing beyond the theatre, the cry of a gull enlarged into something almost divine.

Before telling a story, the production reminds us of something more fundamental.

Theatre begins not with narrative.

It begins with wonder.