【明報專訊】To help the audience picture the difficulty of playing the title role in the Peking opera "The Inebriated Consort" (《貴妃醉酒》), the producers invited an opera apprentice and a little girl to learn the part from Zhang Jing (張晶), a venerated artist who could trace her lineage back to the legendary Mei Lanfang (梅蘭芳). The child, a complete stranger to the idiom of opera, wobbled and dithered about despite her best efforts. But even the apprentice failed to replicate even a fraction of the range of nuances Zhang could magically summon by the mere turn of a head or wave of a hand.