The Good Person of Sezuan
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The Good Person of Sichuan, also known as The Good Person of Szechwan or The Good Woman of Sichuan, (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan) is a play by the German playwright, poet, theatre critic, and theorist Bertolt Brecht. It was written between 1939 and 1941, but completed in 1943 while the author was living in temporary political exile in the United States, and was first performed in 1943 at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in Switzerland with a musical score and songs by Swiss composer Huldreich Georg Früh. Today, Paul Dessau's composition of the songs from 1947-48, also authorized by Brecht, is far more well-known than Früh's. David Harrower was authorized to create a new translation entitled The Good Soul of Szechuan, premiering at the Young Vic theatre from 8 May to 28 June 2008 with Jane Horrocks as Shen Te/Shui Ta. This retained several features of the 1943 version, including the themes of heroin and drug-dealing.
This play, along with many of the author's others in this period, is considered an example of epic theatre, not written to be staged according to the traditional practices and assumptions of the "realistic" theatre.
[edit] Title and theme
In English this play is often referred to, as The Good Woman of Sichuan, as it appears in the authoritative translation of the text prepared by pre-eminent Brecht scholar Eric Bentley, in which he chooses to suggest an exclusively feminine title character. In the original German, however, the play is titled "Der gute Mensch von Sezuan", and so the most linguistically accurate and specific title would be The Good Person of Sichuan. Most subsequent translations (such as that of John Willet) use the unisex Person in the title. David Harrower's 2008 translation for the Young Vic uses the term Good Soul, drawing on a deeper, more spiritual quality of the word relating to an inner kindness.[1] Additional confusion has come from the lack of uniformity in the spelling of the setting: Sezuan, Setzuan, Szechwan, Szechuan have all been used. Today, the proper spelling for the Chinese province would be the pinyin variant Sichuan, and some translations have been updated to reflect that. However, Brecht was never interested in anthropological accuracy in his choice of setting, but rather in its universal epic application. Originally, Brecht planed to call it Die Ware Liebe (The Product Love—love as a commodity) which is a word play, because the German term Die wahre Liebe (true love) is pronounced in the same way.[2]
This confusion of titling points to the central problem of the play, which follows a young woman, a prostitute named Shen Te, as she struggles to lead a life that is "good" (according to the terms of the morality that is taught by the gods and to which her fellow citizens of Sichuan pay lip service), without allowing herself to be abused and trod upon by those who would accept and, more often than not, abuse her goodness. Her neighbors and even her friends prove so brutal in the filling of their bellies that in order to protect herself she invents an alter ego: a male cousin named Shui Ta, who is cold and stern, a protector of Shen Te's interests. Thus the difficult theme of qualitative "goodness" (which seemed so simple and obvious in the title of the play) is rendered unstable by application to both genders, as Shen Te realizes she must operate under the guise of both in order to live a good life.
Brecht's strong belief in Marxist doctrine is made evident through the play as he attempts to redefine contemporary morality and altruism in strong economic terms. Absolute altruism, i.e. a moral code of unconditional giving with no return, is put in direct conflict with Shui Ta's capitalist society of exploitation, the implication being that economic systems dictate morality. Brecht further underlines the sexual undertones of capitalism by having the former prostitute Shen Te adopt a male alter-ego, a phallic personality capable of exerting influence and taking what he needs. According to Brecht, under such a society it is impossible to give without also taking. The implied solution, for which Brecht went before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, is a Marxist/Communist society in which, through nationalization of private property and interdependence, all altruism goes to serve both the community and the individual.
[edit] Plot summary
The play opens with Wang, a water carrier, explaining to the audience that he is on the city outskirts awaiting the foretold appearance of several important gods. Soon the gods arrive and ask Wang to find them shelter for the night. They are tired, having traveled far and wide in search of good people who still live according to the principles that they, the gods, have handed down. Instead they have found only greed, evil, dishonesty, and selfishness. The same turns out to be true in Sichuan: no one will take them in, no one has the time or means to care for others - no one except the poor young Shen Te, whose pure inherent charity cannot allow her to turn away anyone in need.
Shen Te is rewarded for her hospitality, as the gods take it as a sure sign of goodness. They give her money and she buys a humble tobacco shop which they intend as both gift and test: will Shen Te be able to maintain her goodness with these newfound means, however slight they may be? If she succeeds, the gods' confidence in humanity would be restored. Though at first Shen Te seems to live up the gods' expectations, her generosity quickly turns her small shop into a messy, overcrowded poorhouse which attracts crime and police supervision. In a sense, Shen Te quickly fails the test, as she is forced to introduce the invented cousin Shui Ta as overseer and protector of her interests. Shen Te dons a costume of male clothing, a mask, and a forceful voice to take on the role of Shui Ta. Shui Ta arrives at the shop, coldly explains that his cousin has gone out of town on a short trip, curtly turns out the hangers-on, and quickly restores order to the shop.
At first, Shui Ta only appears when Shen Te is in a particularly desperate situation, but as the action of the play develops, Shen Te becomes unable to keep up with the demands made on her and is overwhelmed by the promises she makes to others. Therefore she is compelled to call on her cousin's services for longer periods until at last her true persona seems to be consumed by her cousin's severity. Where Shen Te is soft, compassionate, and vulnerable, Shui Ta is unemotional and pragmatic, even vicious; it seems that only Shui Ta is made to survive in the world in which they live. In what seems no time at all, he has built her humble shop into a full-scale tobacco factory with many employees.
Eventually one of the employees hears Shen Te crying, but when he enters only Shui Ta is present. The employee demands to know what he has done with Shen Te, and when he cannot prove where she is, he is taken to court on the charge of having hidden or possibly murdered his cousin. The townspeople also discover a bundle of Shen Te's clothing under Shui Ta's desk, which makes them even more suspicious. During the process of her trial, the gods appear in the robes of the judges, and Shui Ta says that he will make a confession if the room is cleared except for the judges. When the townspeople have gone, Shen Te reveals herself to the gods, who are confronted by the dilemma that their seemingly arbitrary divine behavior has caused: they have created impossible circumstances for those who wish to live "good" lives, yet they refuse to intervene directly to protect their followers from the vulnerability that this "goodness" engenders.
At the end, following a hasty and ironic (though quite literal) deus ex machina, the narrator throws the responsibility of finding a solution to the play's problem onto the shoulders of the audience. It is for the spectator to figure out how a good person can possibly come to a good end in a world that, in essence, is not good. The play relies on the dialectic possibilities of this problem, and on the assumption that the spectator will be moved to see that the current structure of society must be changed in order to resolve the problem.
[edit] Notes
- ^ See "The Mensch factor in general practice", British Journal of General Practice, 2006 December 1; 56(533): 976–979.
- ^ Thomson, Peter; Glendyr Sacks (1994). The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, p121. ISBN 0521424852.
