“There is a ban on any visual image or written image of the era of the famine [that took place in 1958 to 1961 and killed 40 million people] and the cultural revolution. Writers can’t write about it, there’s nothing on television, no pictures, no photographs, so people who haven’t lived through that period don’t have a visual image of that period. We have a quite clear picture of what it was like in Nazi Germany, there are some pictures of Stalinist Russia, but there’s not a single picture of the famine. So I think the play has filled a gap. It has given a visual image of what life was about then.”