Bertold Brecht - The Good Person of Szechuan

The Malthouse say this is their flagship production for 2014. A co-production between the Malthouse Theatre and the National Theatre of China, it is directed by Meng Jinghui, and has Chinese surtitles.

The Good Person of Szechuan (1945) is  a morality play about how hard it is for the poor to be morally good.  This is an interesting riposte to the saying of Jesus that it is harder for the rich to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle eye.

The Malthouse introduction says  "The Good Person of Szechuan [Shen Te] is kind to three homeless strangers, taking them in when no one else would despite her own poverty. After the strangers reveal themselves to be gods, they reward Shen Te for her altruism with a small tobacco shop – an opportunity to turn her life around. But soon the shop is overrun with mooching townsfolk all wanting their piece. Too sweet to defend herself and her assets, Shen Te develops an alter-ego – her pushy male ‘cousin’, Shui Ta. As ethics dissolve, goodness is defiled and wickedness rewarded."



The Malthouse translator adds that the production is set in a city that is “not a real place, a nightmare city somewhere in the space between Melbourne, Beijing, Berlin and by extension Mosul, Donetsk, Aleppo, Kandahar, Santa Monica …”
Leaving aside the the big question of who, rich or poor, experiences the more moral difficulty, it is a truth almost universally acknowledged that audiences experiencing Brecht are in for a hard time. According to one critic "...Brecht is a political litmus test for artists, [and] productions of his plays will all too often be an endurance test for audiences".

We thought the players and set were superb.

 

There were some effects that didn't make sense to us (eg pinning tails on everyone and later chopping them off  and a  moment of seemingly gratuitous male flash).

Not an easy drama, but a gripping experience. We're glad to have grappled with it.

Images from Malthouse

Prado Italian Masterpieces

 

We saw the NGV Winter exhibition at the invitation of our financial adviser. The gathering  included drinks and canapés and a short introductory talk in the Persimmon Room. This was a good social introduction to the evening, and the exhibition was not unduly crowded.

The exhibition had its own Italian -Spanish integrity and the works were, of their kind, magnificent, so Melbournians are very privileged to have access to them on our turf. We are glad to have spent a couple of hours with them.

The majority of the works have a Christian subject, and are firmly anchored in the Christian vision of their time and place (southern Europe catholicism). Titian's Religion succoured by Spain dealing with a triumph over Islam and complete with a snake representing Protestant heresy sums it up


Did Titian really have that view of Spain or was the Master creating art for his patrons? Perhaps a bit of each. Someone imbued with a north European or Byzantine culture view may not be moved.

The biblical themes have perhaps become over familiar, so we found it difficult to experience an engagement of religious sentiment in a gallery context, but this Corregio perspective on one of Christ's resurrection encounters does have emotional grip in spite of the obvious anachronism and geographic misplacement of the representation-


I also thought that Battista got the narrative tone of the16th century Salome and head of John the Baptist right (at the top of the blog), even though the effect is something like seeing Shakespeare's Henry V actors in camouflage fatigues.
I will not feel impoverished never to see any more martyrdoms of St Sebastian, although Reni thought one arrow would suffice


Reproductions are from the ABC accessed 7 July 2014