|
|
 |
| |
Jane Horrocks as Shen Te |
West End theatre| Bertholt Brecht's The Good Soul of Szechuan |
Old Vic review |
THE GOOD SOUL OF SZECHUAN
Young Vic
EVERY few years or so, Bertholt Brecht experiences a revival. Producers bring him in from the cold; critics offer him hot cocoa and apologise for their misguided cruelty. The deceased playwright would have approved: he never thought his plays finished, revising them to fit current events.
Director Richard Jones’s reworking could not be more up to the minute. The story of three gods searching the troubled Chinese province for a good soul to prove this world is not yet forsaken stands in sharp relief to the catastrophic earthquake in China last week. Dramatically too, the production feels breathtakingly modern. Mirian Buether’s ingenious stage design completely reinvents the Young Vic space, bringing the audience through backstage into a bustling concrete factory. Workers scurry past, dust stings the eyes.
The deities enter backwards in business conference garb. They are looking for a place to stay and, by extension, their one good soul. The water-seller, Wang (an excellent, Aspergerly turn by Adam Gillen), leads them to the kind-hearted prostitute Shen Te (Jane Horrocks). In return for her charity they give her money, enough to buy a tobacco shop.
But no sooner is Shen Te out of the gutter than she is overrun with parasites. Distant acquaintances appear from the woodwork, keen to sample her comfort. Even the pilot she loves is fleecing her.
Unable to survive under the weight of their demands and chained to philanthropy by the hopes of the gods, Shen Te creates a mean-spirited alter ego – her cousin, Mr Shui Ta.
The rarely performed Santa Monica version of the text makes heroin, rather than tobacco, the cause of Shui Ta’s wealth to ram the moral conflict home. A tragi-comic wedding scene has also been added, with Shen Te’s husband-to-be dragging out the ceremony to wait, impossibly, for Shui Ta and his dowry.
Yet David Harrower’s trim translation cannot remove the clunkiness of Brecht’s dialogue completely. Take the atonal songs, rendered with the best intentions. Anyone for an encore of “The Song of the Powerlessness of the Gods and the Good”? Thought not.
And what would Brecht have made of his leading lady? Horrocks is utterly charming: her Shui Ta (Review cover) cuts a tiny but dashing figure; as Shen Te her large eyes swell with wonderment at the world outside. One imagines Brecht would have scolded her for staring so romantically, for encouraging us to “engage”.
For him, a play’s purpose was to inspire self-reflection, and he has succeeded here. The messages – that suffering corrupts, that all charity has an equal and opposite effect – sit heavy on the soul.
“I sell water, cups of water,” sings the water-seller Wang. “Now, of course, it’s pissing raining.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
