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Tang Xianzu's

The Peony Pavilion

Directed by Chen Shi-Zheng

Set Designer Huang Hai Wei
Costume Designer Cheng Shu Yi
Lighting and Properties Designer Yi Li Ming

with
Qian Li in the role of Du Liniang (Beautiful Du);

and forty actors, singers and musicians



This programme presents an abridged version of the sixteenth-century masterpiece of Kunju opera, The Peony Pavilion. It focuses on the romantic and poetic love story that lies at the heart of this epic and presents theatrical highlights from Tang Xianzu’s vivid story-book section of life in China as it may have existed during the Song dynasty, between 960 and 1279.

Du Liniang (Beautiful Du) first meets Liu Mengmei in an erotic dream. Unable to find him in real life, she pines away and dies. The judge of the Underworld, struck by her beauty, allows her to return to Earth as a ghost to look for her true love. Liu risks all to bring her back to life and marry her. The couple encounter many obstacles, including parental opposition, invading Mongol hordes, bungling comic servants and rustics, marauding brigands and a host of other characters – one hundred and sixty in all, played by twenty-three actors.

The Peony Pavilion’s universality and theatrical immediacy generates an audience appeal that has lost none of its power, even today. Over the course of eighteen hours – the full running time of the work – intimate episodes alternate with elaborate set pieces, lyrical poetry with low slapstick comedy.

The story is told through a flowing sequence of some two hundred arias that have an attractively tuneful, folk-like quality. Twelve musicians, present on stage, play bamboo flutes, two-stringed viols, lutes, dulcimer and panpipes. A Kunju artist conveys feeling and emotion through vocal inflection, movement, facial expression and gracefully stylised gestures, all in exquisitely balanced proportion: a combination of entrancing beauty.
Chinese opera is an all-embracing art form and acting, singing, dance, acrobatics, stilt-walking, puppetry, recitation, pageantry, martial arts all find a place in the rich tapestry of The Peony Pavilion. The director, Chen Shi-Zheng, sought to “rediscover the essence of the art form” in this production. It is his own vision of the piece, created, he says “by respectfully drawing upon, but not re-interpreting, the performance tradition of Chinese opera.” The Los Angeles Times noted, “With Peony Pavilion, the multi-talented Cheng – himself a singer of both Chinese and Western opera – has created a production of the scope, greatness, originality and importance of the handful of most important theatrical and operatic events of our time. It stands with the most important epics of Robert Wilson, the Théâtre du Soleil and Peter Brook.”

The all-Chinese cast – some from China, some now living in the United States – are astonishing performers and, as the young couple, Qian Yi and Wen Yu Hang are spell-binding. Made by the finest carpenters and embroiderers in China, the sets and costumes are a feast for the eye. Lavish props, exotic head-dresses and elaborate make-up all add to the visual enchantment of The Peony Pavilion. Following the huge success of the eighteen-hour production at the 1999 Lincoln Center Festival in New York, it was presented at the Grande Halle Villette in Paris during the 1999 Festival d’Automne, when it was recorded, over six days, for this television presentation.

“Forget about definitions and preconceptions, make an inner surrender and enjoy.” (New York Magazine)

Cast: Qian Yi, Wen Yuhang
Producer(s): Colin Wilson
Director(s): Derek Bailey
Format: Colour
Classification: Exempt
Running Time: 120 minutes
Studio: RM Associates
Download Size: 702.72 MB