Peking opera with a difference The audience positively roared its approval of the Ya-Yin Peking opera troupe’s performance of Wang K’uei Fails Chiao Ch’iao-ying. Excellent voice projection, good enunciation and sustained drama were just some of the reasons for the private troupe’s success. Perhaps a more compelling one was the audience’s fascination with the innovations that Ya-Yin’s 37-year old founder Kuo Hsiao-chuang has brought to this art form. Peking opera is a performing art whose strictness is a challenge for performers to first meet, and, if they are exceptionally talented, later transcend. In both Taiwan and China, the numbers of devotees to Peking opera have diminished during the past few decades because it is mainly the old who go to performances. Kuo Hsiao-chuang believes that by making changes, she can help reverse the trend. She claims to have young people jamming the aisles at her performances in Taiwan. The most radical change she advocates is tightening up the scripts by cutting repetitive scenes. In this way time can be saved, and the patience once needed to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour story is not tested so cruelly. “I have always thought it is true of Peking opera, as it is true of all Chinese opera, that the action should be tight in order to keep people coming to the theatres,” she said in a recent interview. “Of course in the old days, people went to the Peking opera to hear the voices and watch the movements; they were not particularly concerned about the logic of the plot. But these days, audiences are much more concerned about the presentation as a whole.” Ya-Yin’s performances in Hongkong were refreshing in their compactness. Even before the curtain came up on Wang K’uei, a song, drum and string trio had already told the audience the first part of the story. It could be argued that some of the poetry is lost with the cuts, but it did not seem that there was anything missing because the new version remains intensely poetic. However, it did strike this viewer that some of the stage movements and transitions were not executed as delicately as they could have been. This was more than made up for by the vigour and charisma of the principal players. One of Kuo Hsiao-chuang’s most intriguing changes is the injection of gentle string interludes derived from southern Chinese opera traditions. |
