Bootleg Faust is an experimental theater adaptation of Goethe's classic work Faust.

German playwright Johann von Goethe's signature work, Faust, tells the tale of a lofty scholar who sells his soul to Satan in exchange for a life filled with love and happiness. It is a piece of theater that is rarely staged, due to the work's cryptic and often confusing narrative. But Meng adapted the work in a comic way with Chinese characteristics.

The production currently being staged is a visually stimulating exploration of human nature and an often hilarious satire of Chinese pop-culture. Meng Jinghui stays true to his own innovative, trademarked style by skillfully wielding a hyperactive phalanx of lights, sound, movement, and language to distract the audience from the play's minimalist action, plot, and character development.

The 'stage' for Bootleg Faust is a ground-level brick floor featuring three simple wooden tables, surrounded by piles of sand forming the only barrier between the actors and their audience. This stark space functions, among other things, as a spartan scholar's cell, a bar, a model's catwalk and the planet Mars. The intimate black-box feeling of the Small Stage of the People's Art Theater, and the actors' innovative use of space - Mephistopheles first appears hanging from the ceiling - ensures that the audience is constantly involved in the drama unfolding before them.

With Faust as the vehicle we are transported through a bizarre dream-like world of pleasure and pain as he explores the source and meaning of 'pure happiness.' The journey he embarks upon mirrors the reality of the individual trapped within any given society. As Meng Jinghui says, "To me, Faust is not a foreigner. He is me. He is all of us."

The dialogue in Bootleg Faust incorporates diverse dramatic devices including passages from classical Chinese poetry, references to characters from Chinese history and literature, contemporary slang, parodies of Greek mythology, and spoofs of the absurd dialogue that clutters so many contemporary TV shows.

Although the original work was adapted for the Chinese stage by Shen Lin, head of the Central Academy of Drama's Theater Research Institute, the script was a collaboration of ideas and improvisation. The play's language is certainly the most powerful dramatic tool in Bootleg Faust, with acerbic criticism pointed at China's intellectuals, both traditional and modern, via the exaggerated use of classical literature and stereotypical representations of the conventional Chinese scholar.