Photos provided to China Daily

Hua is contrasted with his wife, played by Wan Fang with a high wattage of humanity, a woman who has to make ends meet with a middle-class salary, and with his dim-witted colleague and neighbor, played by Yan Nan, who acts as Hua's unvarnished instinct, or "id" in Freudian parlance.

But Wei Yi-Cheng steals the show with a tableau of five supporting characters who make up a sketch of society at large. Each one has such a distinct style of speaking and acting, let alone look and personality, that there's no danger of mixing them up.

Yet, each is funny in his own way, especially the cop who reminds me of all those young men critical of the establishment but fight for a chance to get into the civil service as if it's the best job in the world, and also, the delivery guy with a coffin.

Does the coffin portend something? It seems only a prop for comedy. I Won't Pay! I Won't Pay! is not a brooding piece with layers of meaning. Rather, it is a cry in the dark-OK, shall we say smog - that vents your frustrations. It is cathartic at the most fundamental level.

The play is to run in the following cities: Shenzhen, Dec 14-15; Shanghai, Dec 21-22; Chengdu, Dec 27-28; Hefei, Jan 4; Beijing, Jan 9-11; and Hangzhou, Jan 19.