Pingju: the opera that learned to speak plainly in Tangshan

The leading instrument is a banhu, a bowed fiddle, and it carries the tune while the clapper marks the tempo. Pingju is a bangzi opera, built on banqiang, a system of set tunes varied by tempo and metre, so one melody can be slow and grieving in a scene and quick and joking in the next. The clapper and the fiddle between them carry a whole performance.

The form is also called Pingxi, and its older name was Pingqiang bangzi, a flat-tune clapper opera.

What distinguishes it is the words. The spoken passages and the sung lines stay close to ordinary northern speech, so an audience can follow the plot by ear, and the form travelled easily for that reason. Its home is Luanzhou, a county of Tangshan, and the city is still described as the place where Pingju began.

The roles began small. Pingju was a three-role opera, xiaosheng, the young man, xiaodan, the young woman, and xiaohualian, the clown, and its repertory includes Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai, Qin Xianglian, Liu Qiaoer, Hua Wei Mei, Yang Sanjie Sues and Taohua An. In the Republican period it was the most famous of China's regional operas, admired for passionate performance and romantic plots.

The cinema took it up early. In 1936 Zhang Shichuan made Red Begonia with Bai Yushuang, the actress known as the Queen of Pingju. Other celebrated names are Xin Fengxia and her teacher Hua Furong.

The form was put together in the 1910s by Cheng Zhaocai. He took lianhualuo, a narrative ballad art, joined it to bengbeng opera, a local song-and-dance play, and drew in performance styles and musical elements from Hebei clapper opera and Peking opera. He also took something from Tangshan shadow play, the screen theatre of the same region. The result was a new genre, named Pingqiang bangzi.

The name caused trouble. When the Nationalist government moved the capital and Beijing became Beiping, Peking opera was renamed Pingju, and the abbreviation of Pingqiang bangzi collided with the new name. On advice, Cheng changed his genre's name to Pingju, written with a different character, the one that means to judge or discuss, with Pingxi for the shorter form. The name held.

The repertory that made it famous is still performed: Yang Sanjie Sues, Qin Xianglian, Liu Qiaoer, Hua Wei Mei, Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai, Taohua An. Yang Sanjie Sues was written in the early Republic and is the clearest case of the opera's taste for a story set in its own day rather than in a remote dynasty.

Tangshan's theatrical life is broader than one opera. The city is also the home of Tangshan shadow play and of Laoting drums. Pingju is counted among the five most popular operas in the country, and it is still described as the city's own form.

Pingju kept making plays about its own time. From the early twentieth century it produced a long run of modern-dress works, more of them, and without a break, than Peking opera managed, and after 1949 that continued. The China Pingju Theatre, founded in Beijing in the 1950s, was given the production of modern plays as its main task. Its repertory included Jinsha River Bank, Duoyin, Xiangyang Store, Accountant Girl, Red Liaison Station, Wild Horse, Garland at the Foot of the High Mountain, Heitou and the Four Famous Eggs, and Erleng's Mother.

The stagecraft changed as well. Pingju had been a three-role form, with no painted-face role at all. After 1949 the actor Wei Rongyuan worked with the musicians He Fei and Yang Pei to combine Pingju tunes with the vocal production and movement of the jing, the painted-face role of Peking opera, and a Pingju jing role came into being.

Film carried the new role. In 1955 the Changchun Film Studio made Qin Xianglian, the first Pingju film in the People's Republic, and Bao Zheng, the judge at its centre, was played in the jing role.

The old repertory and the new one sit together now. The opera that began as a ballad joined to a village play in Tangshan is still counted among the five most popular operas in China, and its plain speech is still the reason audiences follow it without a text.