Der gute Mensch von Sezuan was translated by Michael Hoffmann for Deborah Warner's production at London's National Theatre, as The Good Person of Sichuan. Warner is hailed as something of a young lioness among the new crop of directors. She says she does not like to do contemporary plays very much, because “the themes are not big enough.” This exception to her rule is justified by a reference to the Waterloo street people who sleep in cardboard boxes under concrete walkways near the National Theatre. Warner says they have inspired her and fit in with her wish to find “great expressions of the human heart.” For thematic reasons, which I will come to later, her statement seems both blockheaded and cruel, and it may explain the dreadful mess that she and her translator - abetted by composer Dominic Muldowney - have made of the play.
The action is straightforward: Three Gods come to Sichuan in search of a good person. They find Shen Te, a whore addicted to a lethally pure form of generosity. This tart-with-a-heart is given some money by the Gods. She buys a tobacco shop and is promptly inundated with greedy, ill-tempered spongers, plus a grasping and selfish lover. Faced with ruin, she masks herself as “cousin” Shui Ta - a tough cookie who gets rid of the schnorrers and the lover and makes the tobacco business flourish (in this production Warner incorporates a bit of extra nonsense which Brecht added in America, making the tobacco into opium; it does not help much). Made pregnant by her lover, Shen Te has trouble keeping up the “cousin” disguise, and - in the role of Shui Ta - finds herself accused by the spongers and the lover of murdering her real, generous self.
The Final Trial
This leads to a final trial, judged by the Gods; the court is cleared, and Shen Te exposes her double role to the Gods. Unwilling to condemn the good person they have found, they wag their fingers, make excuses, and tell her not to be the bad cousin too often. Then they ascend to heaven again, uttering Panglossian banalities. There is an epilogue, not used in this production, in which Brecht acknowledges the weakness of his silly ending. In proper lehrstuck fashion he addresses the audience:
Soll es ein andrer menschsein?
Oder eine andre Welt?…
Verehrtes Publikum, los, such
dir selbst den Schluss!
Warner sets the action in a giant propped-up concrete shell, from which a girder has fallen right across the stage, one end high up against the concrete, the other resting on the ground. Now and again a flat is lowered to represent Shen Te's tobacco shop or a café. Later, half the revolving stage rises to reveal a ghastly opium den amid the web of steel lathing underneath. There are various stumps of concrete scattered about the stage, which become hiding places, a tree in the park, and so on.
The costumes are a bewildering sartorial confusion. An occasional Chinese-looking garment appears; for the spongers and the lover there is an assortment of seedy, bright, quasi-California eccentric (Day-Glo yellow baseball hat, shorts, Hawaiian shirt) or British lower-middle-class suburban drab; the Good Person wears a flowered sack-like garment, while her tough alter ego swaggers about in a greasy dark suit and a
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