Peking behind the scenes

The Peking opera troupe visiting Ireland this weekend has spent decades perfecting its art, as Rosita Boland discovers in Beijing

Home for the Mei Lanfang Peking Opera Troupe is a vast complex of 10-storey buildings in south-western Beijing. As well as rehearsing and storing their costumes here, they live here: more than 1,000 performers in all. Half are students and current performers, half are retired. They and their families will spend the rest of their lives in the complex. When you are accepted as a student into the demanding discipline of Peking opera, you have a home for life as well as a job.

It's morning, and members of the troupe are rehearsing two of the four pieces they are bringing to Ireland this weekend. Most operas in the Peking style are very long, lasting several hours. Although they are as popular in China as Bollywood films are in India, full-length Peking operas do not go down well in the West. So the company adapts its programme when it performs abroad.

Tourists in Beijing see the same pieces, although not usually performed by a company of the standard of the Mei Lanfang troupe, which is considered the best in China. It has a repertoire of short pieces: complete stories that showcase the elements of Peking opera: acrobatics, singing, martial arts and drama.

The two pieces that the company is running through today are called Stealing Silver In The Bank and The Crossroads. The first, the charming story of a newly married couple who need money, highlights music and drama. The husband robs a bank while the wife distracts the guards. Like all Peking opera it's very stylised and skilful, accompanied by 12 musicians who play to the pace of the acting. There is also a lot of the opera's distinctive singing, which at times is so highly pitched that to an ear unused to the tone it sounds rather like a very loud musical wail.

The second piece, The Crossroads, is about mistaken identity. Two men search for each other in the darkened room of an inn, each thinking the other is a murderer. It is a magnificent display of martial arts. As it is meant to be dark, the men seek each other out, unaware that they are virtually next to each other the entire time. In their acrobatics and martial-arts movement they constantly pass within millimetres of each other in an outstanding piece of choreography and performance.

Afterwards I lift the wooden swords and batons the performers have been working with so fluently. They're on the verge of heavy, made of solid wood. After only a short time wielding the sword my hand begins to ache. The floor the performers rehearse on is not sprung; neither is there any special matting. They've been performing on a piece of ordinary carpet, which gives them virtually no protection during the strenuous acrobatics.

Are there a lot of injuries, I ask the troupe's director, Mei Baojiu, in his office afterwards. "Yes, yes," he says, matter-of-factly. "But as they practise they learn teamwork and how to protect themselves when they fall."

Unsurprisingly, it requires much discipline to train for Peking opera. Beijing has two professional training schools for children, who start at 10. They are chosen for their physical condition and flexibility. Each school accepts 60 students a year.

"There used to be a few thousand children applying every year, but now the numbers are down, because everyone wants to be a TV star instead," Baojiu says laconically.

It requires eight years of basic training to get to the standard required to perform the pieces I've seen today. Even then performers continue to learn. They are graded according to their talent - professor, lecturer, first-class actor, second-class actor - and listed in the programmes as such. There used to be 16 categories of accomplishment; now there are just the four. The grade you are on also determines the money you earn.

The troupe tours at least twice a year. Last year it was in India. This year, in addition to coming to Ireland, it will have been to Spain and the US. It is a frequent visitor to the US, to where it first travelled an astonishing 74 years ago, not long after it was established.

Although today is not a dress rehearsal, costume is a key part of Peking opera. The extremely elaborate outfits are works of art in their own right. It takes two months to make one costume: a complicated mass of silk, brocade, golden thread and embroidery. A costume lasts about 10 years, but those for martial-arts performers have to be replaced far more often.

Special factories produce other props essential to Peking opera, such as the equally elaborate - and very heavy - jewelled headdresses that all the performers wear. Mei Lanfang Peking Opera Troupe had been hoping to bring a selection of costumes with it to Ireland, to put on display, but no suitable location could be found.

Thirty members of the troupe are coming to Ireland this weekend for their two shows at the National Concert Hall. It is a rare opportunity to see a unique art form, performed by its best practitioners. Bring opera glasses for a better look at those beautiful costumes. And be prepared for those distinctive wails.

• The performers of the Peking Opera House of Beijing are at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, tomorrow and Sunday