Visiting theaters and exchanging opinions on the performances have been the talk of the town in the coastal city of Xiamen where the 11th China Theater Festival is going on.

Twenty-eight works, including three from Taiwan and one jointly created by the artistic groups from both sides of the Taiwan Strait, are being staged in theaters throughout the city.

For most local people, it is their first taste of the plays coming from the island, because it's the first time for Taiwan plays to be staged at the event. They are surprised to see what the artists are doing right across the Strait.

"I am surprised the Peking opera could be made this," Gao Hongbin, a local spectator and a gala director told Xinhua after a three-hour Taiwan Peking opera on Saturday when the festival opened. "It was fantastic, just like seeing Hollywood blockbusters."

The play, "The Golden Cangue," an adaptation from Eileen Chang's classic novel, was performed by the island's Guoguang Opera Company.

It was the first Taiwan drama staged at the festival. It features a psychological tale of a woman tormented by desire and greed. The play employs stage partition to create changes of space and time and makes full use of film montage to present Chang's visual imagination and compact plot.

"The play is a successful example of integrating the conventions of cinema and Western drama into the traditional Peking opera," said Ji Guoping, secretary-general of the China Dramatists Association, which organized the event. "And the techniques only help the protagonist shine."

Lin Hsinghui, an assistant professor of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, told Xinhua some 1,000 tickets of "The Golden Cangue" were sold out a few days in the university when she released the poster on the campus.