Watch highlights from The Peony Pavilion

In its original form, The Peony Pavilion,a 16th-century poetic drama or Kunqu opera, ran to 55 scenes and 20 hours. Fortunately for bums on Sadler’s Wells seats, the producer Kenneth Pai’s palatable version for the Suzhou Kunqu Opera Company of Jiangsu province has more than halved it, with the sub-title The Young Lovers’ Edition, to be shown in three three-hour parts.

In Book 1, The Dream of Love (which is all I can report on), the heroine, Du Liniang, beauteous daughter of the regional governor, yearns for the emancipation of love – sexual as well as romantic - and finds fulfilment with a dream lover who, in real life, will turn out to be a poor scholar, Liu Mengmei. Languishing and anguishing amid memories of her dream, she pines and dies. In the later parts come resurrection and the lovers’ reunion, triumphing over many vicissitudes.

The designs are lovely: decors of calligraphy and nature paintings (the awakening of spring is a theme), and an impressionist garden with lily pond. The costumes are colourfully elaborate or delicately exquisite. The actor-singers are also exquisite: Shen Fengying as the heroine, a rarefied confection in pink and white, looking like porcelain; Yu Jiuling as her lover, no less decorative in make-up.

Their singing is wonderful in its range, though the style takes some getting used to. In dialogue, the women coo or meow in a form of speech-song that, at its most swooping, suggests Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. This goes for the male lover, too, whose voice soars into falsetto. Extended arias, like the music generally, are lovely - from plaintively melodic to swelling surges. The most luscious of these soliloquies are Du Liniang’s narration of her dream, in decorously erotic poetry, and of painting her own portrait to preserve her beauty. Shen Fengying’s performance is a tour de force.

Comic moments are provided by Lu Jia as her maid, Spring Fragrance, and Tao Hongzheng as Sister Stone, a nun who tells us a bawdy story about a gynaeco-logical abnormality that has left her impenetrable. Apart from a scene with the emperor’s warriors, this first part’s dance movement is sweet and stately: simple, elegant measures making expressive use of long sleeves, but also a charming set piece with the Flower God and his attendant fairies, 10 beautiful women gliding as if on casters, and a spectacular finale in which Du Liniang’s departing soul is cloaked in red, a harbinger of her future return to life.

Earlier at the Wells came the world premiere of Sutra, created by the Belgian-Moroccan choreo-grapher Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui for a most unusual cast: 17 young Buddhist monks from the Shaolin Temple in Henan province. Their physical prowess, as we know from some kitschy shows at the Peacock Theatre, is in the martial arts, which go hand in hand with spirituality in their culture.

The monks are an engaging troupe, especially the 11-year-old Shi Yandong, ever on the go, like an acrobatic imp, or pausing to meditate like an infant Buddha. The piece’s real impact, however, lies in the visuals. The sculptor Antony Gormley supplies the main props: man-sized boxes that the monks rearrange to become coffins, catacombs, prisons, buildings, a lotus blossom, city towers. When the boxes are upright, in Adam Carrée’s atmospheric lighting, they recall one of those stark, early1900s stage sets by Edward Gordon Craig. When blocked into arches, they become Stonehenge.

Many monks dive from a cliff into one box, tightly crammed, with the boy on top scanning the horizon, and we are surely meant to think of boat people. Larbi himself, dressed as a tramp, wanders through the action, a troubled controller who often gets trapped (literally) in his own creation. And Szymon Brzoska’s music supplies wistfully meandering accompaniment. At 75 minutes, Sutra outran interest and, to me, point.

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