校园青春版《牡丹亭》在台首演 再掀昆曲热潮
Twenty years after the youth edition of the classic Kunqu opera The Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭) was first staged in Taipei, a special new “campus youth” version (版本) was performed in Taiwan. This show was unique because all the performers were university students from the Chinese mainland.
Created by famous Taiwan novelist Pai Hsien-yung, the original youth version of this 16th-century opera came out in 2004. It has been put on over 500 times, famous for its nice costumes and wonderful stage design. The campus version is a shorter one of the 9-hour original work. It started from a 2024 project to encourage young people to pass on Kunqu, a 600-year-old Chinese opera listed as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Fifty students from 29 universities were chosen for the show. Though they had little professional Kunqu training, they practiced hard for nearly nine months. They first performed the campus version in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province — the birthplace of Kunqu — in April 2025. All 900 tickets for Thursday’s performance, priced from 300 to 1,500 New Taiwan dollars, were sold out quickly.