A CHINESE THEATRE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1201, 6 March 1885, Page 3

A CHINESE THEATRE.

The Chinese theatre is perhaps seen at its best in the evening What pushing and chattering and quarrelling there is, to be sure, as you make your way through the Celestials who throng i the box office. The box office; too, 1 with its little pigeon holes, seems ■ rather small for the piupose. But as ! the Chinese always bring the exact! sum, no change is and every- | thing moves with admirable despatch. I You have probably engaged a box or “ room,” as the Chinese call it, and, as your name has been posted up con* spicuously upon it, there is no chance of. mistake. The stage is ablaze with brilliant costumes of red and gold. The lights trom the iron chandeliers flare heavily in the draught. Processions of armies, emperors, statesmen, and generals enter in. rapid succession through a red curtained door on one side, and oiit through a red-curtained door on the other. Now the Emperor is holding an audience. The next moment his troops are engaged in bitter combat with the retainers of some unruly vassal. Every species of crime, every form of human passion, is crowded into the brief moment of the fleeting scene. A messenger from Heaven, standing on a chair, delivering his high summons to a fairy fish, is next presented to your confused imagination. Then whirling in angry passion, a painted-face king, pulling his feathers fiercely, and loudly threatening all mamur of dreadful things. The orchestra keeps np an infernal din. In shrill falsetto the characters sing through a sort of high pitched recitative. Presently . you pass down belling the stage, through the paint room, where an actor is making himself as ugly as vermilion and number can well do it; then by a narrow stairway down to the dressroom, rich in its very confusion, and strewn around with costly brocades and satins wherever the convenience of the last actor had left them. It is not long ,before you find yourself standing on the stage, so near the actors, too, that the Emperor’s robes touch you as he sweeps superbly by. Then you are hurried back to your box again, where it is explained to yon that the fighting is still going on, and that So-and-so haskilled So-and so, and is off on horseback. You leave the theatre of the oldest people in the world with a confused idea ot the plot burlesqued by your interpreter, and still more highly coloured by your heated imagination, •with blare of trumpet and the strident wail of the fiddle in your ears, with the smell of all Chinatown in your nostrils, with a headache, perhaps, but with little added to your stock of information. —The Century.