Shanbo and Yingtai

Introduction

One of the four great plays of early local gezai, sung mostly to seven-character and old tunes

Shanbo and Yingtai is a traditional play of gezai, or Taiwanese opera, telling the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, and the national heritage listing for gezai names the Liang and Zhu story among its representative plays. Gezai began as sung narrative in the third person, then took the movement, roles and costume of the chegu troupes of Yilan and became local gezai, which acts the story in the first person. Early local gezai had four great plays, Chen San and Wuniang, Shanbo and Yingtai, the Shixi Ji and Lü Mengzheng, sung mostly to seven-character and old tunes with simple plots. Its first roles were only the clown and the young woman, with the young man added around the end of the Qing, and the three together are called the three small roles. In Yilan troupes such as the Zhuangsan Xinliang band still perform the four great plays. In 2020 the Liao Chiung-chih Taiwanese Opera Foundation sang excerpts from the play, among them the scenes of the page boy buying vegetables and of writing the prescription, at an unamplified concert in Weiwuying.