Opera fights tough battle for shrinking attention spans

When renowned writer Bai Xianyong sat down to abridge Tang Xianzu's The Peony Pavilion in 1983, he was confronted with a formidable task: reducing a 55-act, 20-hour performance to a form digestible for young audiences with a much shorter attention span. He managed to whittle it down to nine hours.

Zhang cites a drama called Pei Shaojun and Li Qianjin as an example of the need to be aware of modern audiences' sensibilities. In the play the hero, Pei Shaojun, follows his father's command to divorce his wife Li Qianjin, but finally reunites with her when his father discovers Li is the daughter of a high official.

"During the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), when the story was written, a husband could be forgiven no matter what he had done, even if he was unfaithful to his wife. I reckon people today would be a lot less forgiving, so I revised the story slightly."

Over the past few months' hiatus, Shao spent a lot of time thinking about a character in Legend of Golden Magpie, a woman confronted with the fact her husband married a concubine. When the wife learns this, she simply replies: "Good." How that line should be delivered was the subject of extensive debate between Shao and Zhang.

"In ancient times Chinese women displayed their virtue by consenting to their husbands having several concubines," Shao says. "The utterance of the word 'good' is an aural and visual presentation of that virtue. But how would a modern audience take that?"

Their solution was to have Shao deliver the word in a way that projected jealousy, fitting the heroine's character while respecting the sensibilities of today's audiences.