Hong Kong performance of Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion by Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe was impressive, but not as ‘complete’ as it claimed to be

It also mentioned that “over the years, multiple generations of artists from the Skot have taken on different versions of the play”.

This last point, though, begs for further clarification.

In the late 1990s, New York’s Lincoln Centre commissioned two radically different versions of The Peony Pavilion for its summer festival: the first, a modern retelling of the four-scene love story by director Peter Sellars with music by Tan Dun; the second, a revolutionary reconstruction of the complete epic staged by the Chinese-born, New York-based xiqu artist Chen Shi-zheng.

Chen’s version, developed with the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe, first became an international incident, then a runaway success.

Initially proclaimed as a model of cultural exchange, Chen’s production – with Paris’ Festival d’Automne, the Sydney Festival and the Hong Kong Arts Festival originally as partners – employed hundreds of Chinese craftspeople to make the sets and costumes.

Adapting Western notions of historic performance practice, Chen tapped scholars both to standardise the script and establish a means of presentation predating Qing dynasty and Communist-era traditions.

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After a public preview a month before its New York premiere, however, the production was branded by Chinese state press as “feudal, superstitious and pornographic”, with Shanghai’s cultural minister unilaterally annulling Lincoln Centre’s contracts with China’s Ministry of Culture, impounding six tons of sets and costumes and blocking performers from leaving the country.

Months later, the materials did arrive in New York and Chen rebuilt his production with his lead actress from Shanghai and a 48-member troupe of actors, musicians and technical workers, half of them recent immigrants to the United States. His Peony opened to immense critical and popular acclaim.

Finally, Western audiences found a compelling contrast to Peking opera’s falsetto-filled, acrobat-driven spectacles, where well-crafted surtitles conveyed each sophisticated narrative twist in real theatrical time.

For several years, any festival with international pretensions was compelled to include Chinese opera. Chen, for his part, became a noted director of new and classic stage epics (most recently Wagner’s Ring Cycle for Opera Australia in December 2023).

In China, the reaction was also profound, even though Chen’s production is still barely mentioned. Roughly six months after Lincoln Centre’s production, the Skot staged its own “official” 35-chapter Peony, applauded in the Shanghai press (although a reporter from The New York Times noted “an element of kitsch”).

In 2004, the Taiwanese novelist and kunqu devotee Bai Xianyong (known in the US as Kenneth Pai) revealed his own idiosyncratic 30-episode version with the Suzhou Kunqu Opera Troupe. Dubbed the “Young Lovers Edition” and with untrained age-appropriate actors cast as the story’s teenage lovers, Bai’s version toured China and the US.

With all this in mind, we need only look at the clock to challenge the Hong Kong Arts Festival production’s claims to completeness.

At about eight-and-a-half hours (plus intermissions), the Skot’s current production spread over two days and three performances is even shorter than Bai’s 30-chapter excerpt, let alone Chen’s full production, which clocked in at 19-and-a-half hours.

A more accurate billing for last weekend’s outing would be “bits of all 55 chapters included”, but it was far from complete.

So what did Hong Kong audiences get to see? Director Guo Xiaonan found a balance between an ancient, minimalist art form with few props or set pieces and a modern, intricate presentation with lighting and visual projections, amplification and a turntable stage.

Vocal arrangements by Xin Qinghua and Zhou Xuehua deftly drove the story’s momentum, alternating between more lyrical arias and narrative recitative.

Li Liang’s understated incidental music wisely avoided the populist Disneyfication that marred Bai’s “Young Lovers Edition”, the 30-member orchestra keeping a distinct Chinese character despite the use of a handful of Western instruments (mostly low strings and pitched percussion).

Most memorable among the 40-member cast were the young lovers: Luo Chenxue’s Du Liniang, who commanded the lion’s share of the show, and Hu Weilu’s Liu Mengmei, with only slightly less stage time. (Both actresses have won national awards for their portrayals.)

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Comic levity ran the gamut, from Zhou Yimin’s coquettish maid Chunxiang to Sun Jinghua’s Sister Stone, his cross-dressing performance avoiding a descent into camp by a silk thread.

The commanding presence of both Zhang Weiwei’s Du Bao and Wu Shuang’s Judge offered ample opportunities for martial arts displays, well executed by the company’s ensemble.

Right up until the final curtain, the performances conveyed a certain breathlessness, leaving barely a moment for reflection.

Over the past week, I’ve returned to the various English translations of The Peony Pavilion on my shelf – the well-annotated scholarship of Cyril Birch, the verbal precision of Zhang Guangqian, the dramatic immediacy of Ben Wang (whose work formed the core of Lincoln Centre’s surtitles) and the versified charm of Wang Rongpei (whose two-volume edition was excerpted for this production’s surtitles) – and reread each of them, not to refresh my memory of what I just saw on stage but to remind myself of what I didn’t.

Tang’s masterpiece presents a full spectrum of society, from servants to the political, military and religious elite, with subtle and complicated rivalries among them.

The wealth of detail often brings to mind writers like Proust, Tolstoy and Dickens, in whose writing characters and situations that initially seem too complex or tangential later reveal themselves to be key to the final outcome.

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She manages to triumph over a wide range of conflicts with religious, family and social expectations while still maintaining her dignity; it’s a portrayal that makes any of Shakespeare’s female characters seem positively anaemic.

In short, the “complete” Shanghai production indeed offers the story’s original scope, but hardly reaches its depth. Hong Kong audiences were treated to a classic Chinese tale, deftly produced and solidly performed. What they didn’t experience was a masterpiece of world literature.

“Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe – The Peony Pavilion (Complete Version)”, Hong Kong Arts Festival 2024, Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Reviewed: March 2-3.