RED BOAT TROUPES AND CANTONESE ... - University of Georgia

I have not seen ritual playlets performed at permanent theatres in Hong Kong in the
2000s, but I have seen them staged at makeshift halls before main features at local festivities.
Some playlets were performed consecutively. Seeing different shows with many performers
wearing colorful bright costumes on stage in a matter of several minutes at the Shek O
community festival in Hong Kong Island, and at the Feast of the Ghost at Kowloon City in Hong
Kong, was certainly enjoyable for me. I seemed to go back in time and watch what my
grandmother saw 90 years earlier in the village Sum Zeng (Deep Well), on the island of Coeng
Zau (Long Island), in the estuary.
Unlike opera seria in the West, Cantonese operas usually have happy endings. Even with
the tragic nature of The Butterfly Lovers, both lovers who die at the end and were unable to get
married live happily ever after as butterflies that dance in the beautiful woods. And in the well-
known Tong Dik Sung tragedy Princess Coeng Ping, the princess and her husband-to-be, both
committed suicide, and both later reunited happily with the princess’s deceased mother in
heaven. In many Cantonese operas, the characters are everyday people –“Verismo” is found in
the plots often. And, of course, the moral teaching of each play praises good people and
punishes bad ones.
Before the establishment of the Republic during Qing dynasty, simple scripts were used
for operas of the Eighteen Standard Plays. As opera reached its golden age between 1911 and
1923, with frequent performances and with some large-scale troupes of a hundred fifty people,
copies of scripts could not be distributed to all the staff. Out-line plays (tai kong hei) with
simple plots and entrance points for characters were posted on a large board backstage with
characters only understood by people of the trade. The performer used his or her improvisational
skills to speak the dialogue and sing the aria. This was a time when the details of conversations
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