Kun Opera: The Peony Pavilion
Time & Date: 7:30pm 27-29 August 2008
      Venue     : PLA Theatre
Price(RMB)  : 50,100,180,280,380

Kun Opera
Kun Opera was included in the top list of the first batch of “Human Beings’ Verbal and Intangible Cultural Heritage Representative Work” selected by UNESCO in 2001. As the current most ancient drama form, Kun Opera is one of the original three of the world’s largest ancient dramas.
Starting from the late Yuan Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty, Kun Opera is a performance and singing art with strict rules and forms, complete patterns, graceful and pleasant tunes, and gentle, lingering music.
With an integration of literature, drama, performance, music, dance, and art, Kun Opera is the stage art with the most poetic and pictorial splendor. Having collected all advantages of China ancient aesthetics, Kun Opera has always been reputed as the founder of all dramas and considered a national treasure.
Kun Opera The Peony Pavilion is the peak work in Chinese dramatic history and is the play that can bring the delicacy and romance of Kun Opera into full play.
Tang Xianzu (1550-1616), was born in Linchuan, Jiangxi Province. This great dramatist, who lived during the reign of the Wanli Emperor during the Ming Dynasty, is often mentioned together with the English dramatist Shakespeare not only because they coincidently died in the same year, but also because their intelligence and achievements are of the same caliber, just like two unprecedented brilliant stars adding to each other’s splendor in the eastern and western skies of drama.
The story of The Peony Pavilion
In the Song Dynasty, there lived a girl from a rich family named Du Liniang in Nan’an City. One day, she goes to the garden to have some fun. She is mesmerized by the unsurpassed spring scenery and ravished by an intoxicating dream, in which a handsome scholar (Liu Mengmei) comes to her with a willow branch and they fall in love at first sight. Waking from the dream, she finds no way to part with his image in her heart and it seems impossible for her to lock up her heart that has just been freed from the bondage of feudal ethics. She is so enchanted by the feeling that she can find herself going nowhere else except in the dream where she stays with Liu Mengmei.
As a result, she gets lost in the smothering atmosphere of her family where she can not follow her heart to choose her ideal spouse. She suffers so much in missing him that she is doomed to fall ill and then return to dust. As she lies dying, she instructs her maid Chunxiang to bury her beside the plum tree in the garden of her family and to bury her portrait under a stone from Tai Lake. Liu Mengmei seems to be directed by this invisible power and he passes through Lin’an on his way to take an examination. He falls ill in Lin’an and stays in the Plum Blossom Temple that Du Liniang’s father has built beside her grave. Liu finds Du Liniang’s portrait there and he falls in love with her at first sight, even though what he is looking at is just a portrait. What’s more, he speaks to her portrait every day and Du Liniang is moved by him again. In his rendezvous with Du’s spirit, the fact that she has died is revealed by, and he follows what Du instructs him to do: to unearth her corpse. Upon doing so, Du Liniang is revived by the power of their deep love. Eventually, as we suspect and hope, they are united and get married.

The Northern Kun Opera Theatre
 
The Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre was founded on June 22, 1957. Based in Beijing, it is one of the professional Kun Opera performing groups in China.

Over 50 years, the Theatre has been engaged in preserving, inheriting, developing and renovating Kun Opera. The Theatre has created a big amount of influential traditional operas, new adapted history operas and modern topic operas in these years. It integrated different characters from both the Northern Style and the Southern Style. Meanwhile, there born many excellent professional actors from domestic and overseas, who can undertake the creation and performance of different kinds of Kun Opera programm.