At the corner of a rehearsal room, Shao Tianshuai, 34, a Kunqu Opera actress of the Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre in Beijing, practices gestures while singing the same lines over and over again.

In the age of the selfie, no such rehearsal can be complete without a mobile phone, although here Shao uses it not for vanity but as a tool for recording, reviewing and improving her performance.

After a theater closure lasting three months due to COVID-19, performance-deprived actors and actresses are back on stage and hard at rehearsal. For Shao, one of the most important tasks is to finish rehearsing for Legend of the Golden Magpie, whose premiere had originally been scheduled for March.

At the center of the room, director Zhang Peng hashes out details with the leading actor. By now Shao has finished her part, but is in no mood to leave.

"Though the date for the drama to be staged is not yet known, we want to be fully prepared," she said.

Legend of the Golden Magpie is a new entry in The Original State Version series, initiated by Zhang and Shao in April 2016. The series consists of four dramas; in each Shao has the leading role and Zhang directs.

The name of this series comes from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, meaning no matter how things change, they eventually return to their natural state. The aim of the series is to trace the style of Kunqu Opera through the Ming and Qing dynasties, as well as attract new audiences.

"Some friends and I were talking about opera and how difficult it is these days to distinguish between the Kunqu form and the Peking form in terms of makeup and costumes," Shao said.

"We were keen to explore what Kunqu Opera looked like hundreds of years ago, and to let our audiences see what that was."

She consulted staff members at the Palace Museum in Beijing and was given access to archives, a search that turned up pictures painted in the Ming and Qing dynasties that would literally change the face of The Original State Version. Shao discovered in those early days a feature of opera actors' makeup was small, delicate lips and thin eyebrows. This style was adopted for the series and has become one of its key characteristics.

Another distinctive feature of the series is all the dramas are no longer than 100 minutes, whereas most traditional pieces last two and half hours.

"People, especially the young, lead fast-paced lives," Shao said. "For those who have never seen Kunqu Opera, two and half hours is a long time to spend in a theater, let alone understand what's going on in the performance. But most movies last about 100 minutes, so I think they can take that."

When renowned writer Bai Xianyong sat down to abridge Tang Xianzu's The Peony Pavilion in 1983, he was confronted with a formidable task: reducing a 55-act, 20-hour performance to a form digestible for young audiences with a much shorter attention span. He managed to whittle it down to nine hours.

Zhang cites a drama called Pei Shaojun and Li Qianjin as an example of the need to be aware of modern audiences' sensibilities. In the play the hero, Pei Shaojun, follows his father's command to divorce his wife Li Qianjin, but finally reunites with her when his father discovers Li is the daughter of a high official.

"During the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), when the story was written, a husband could be forgiven no matter what he had done, even if he was unfaithful to his wife. I reckon people today would be a lot less forgiving, so I revised the story slightly."

Over the past few months' hiatus, Shao spent a lot of time thinking about a character in Legend of Golden Magpie, a woman confronted with the fact her husband married a concubine. When the wife learns this, she simply replies: "Good." How that line should be delivered was the subject of extensive debate between Shao and Zhang.

"In ancient times Chinese women displayed their virtue by consenting to their husbands having several concubines," Shao says. "The utterance of the word 'good' is an aural and visual presentation of that virtue. But how would a modern audience take that?"

Their solution was to have Shao deliver the word in a way that projected jealousy, fitting the heroine's character while respecting the sensibilities of today's audiences.