The plot of Chinese Beijing opera
Most Beijing opera plays are anonymous,having been devised by actors as vehicles through which to display their own performance skills.Many have never been published and exist only as part of the oral acting tradition or in handwritten copies in the possession of individual actors.Many of those that have been published contain no stage directions or descriptions of action; they include only the language that is spoken and sung in performance.In addition to this important component of aural performance, however,Beijing opera plays provide the plots and thereby the characters in whose portrayal performers display their skills,as well as the overall structure of each performance.
The plots of most Beijig opera plays are well-known stories concerning familiar characters.Most early plays were adaptations of the duanqi plays of kunqu,the predominant national theatre form before the ascent of Beijing opera,or of the plays of kunqu's major predecessors,nanxi and zaju.At least half of the 272 Beijing opera plays listed in 1824 had the same titles as plays performed in those earlier theatre forms.The most comprehensive listing of Beijing opera plays to date,Tao Junqi's Jingju jumu diu tan (An Initial Exploration of the Beijing Opera Repertoire), first published in 1957 and updated in 1964 and 1980, includes 1,389 play synopses.According to the scholar Hwang Mei-shu,the plots of more than one-third of these plays can be found in just thirteen novels.Most of the remaining plays in the Beijing opera repertoire are based upon "history,true stories,sketches,notebooks,legends,other novels,and earlier plays."
The “earlier plays" to which Hwang refers include not only kunqu's diuanqi plays,nanxi plays, and zaju plays, but also plays from other regional forms of xiqu,forms that developed earlier than or concurrently with Beijing opera. Many of these plays are also based upon the sources listed by Hwang.In quite a few cases,a single plot has been dramatized in a number of regional forms,and several of these versions have been separately adopted by Beijing opera.Often, these different versions of what is essentially the same play have different titles as well.For instance,The Fishenman's Revenge (Dayu sha jia),The Lucky Pearl(Qing ding zhu),and Demanding Fish Tax (Tao yu shui) share the same plot and characters;the story of The Butterfly Dream (Hudie meng) also occurs as Zhuangzi Fanning the Grave(Zhuangzi shan fen)and Breaking Open the Coffin(Da pi guan). Because they are based upon well-known stories,the plots of Beijing opera plays may “unfold in a leisurely and natural way, without the tension and violence that characterize Western plays··”Dramatic interest does not arise from the plot,for there is very little question as to eventual outcome. As Sophia Delza points out, "This theatre is not one of suspense,as is our Western theatre."Dramatic interest instead arises from the interpretation given these familiar characters,and especially from the expression of their reactions to the circumstance in which they find themselves.In the expression of those feelings and emotions,performers make the greatest,most concentrated display of teir performance skills.
Not surprisingly,this large body of plays with overlapping plots and characters has been classified according to a number of systems during the course of its development.In contemporary China,Beijing opera plays are classified according to three main systems.Although each system is concerned primarily with plot and subject matter,all are related to performance as well.In the first classification system,inaugurated after Liberation in 1949,plays are each placed in one of three categories according to thematic content. This system is based upon the various historical periods during which Beijing opera plays were developed and reflects certain basic, overall peformance considerations.The second two systems are traditional and can be represented as continuums along which each given play is placed.The characterizing extremes of the continuum in the first system are civil (wen)and martial (wu),and those in the second system are serious (daxi,lit. “great play") and light or comic (xiaoxi,lit.“small play"). These two classification systems reflect the different purposes served byeach of the four performance skills-song,speech,dance-acting,and combat-and the relationship of these skills to one another in performance.
