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
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