- Its insight, its engagement with the real world and, especially, for its ability to provoke.
- What's barely been noticed, oddly, is that the production is set in the present-day.
- I think she’s more of a man [Shen Te]
- A vibrant cast, evocative music and colorful costumes distinguish the play [and] Grays’ performance is supremely sublime, realistic and entirely convincing… one almost wants to rush the stage and protect her from the human vultures ready to devour her.
- One of the real strengths of Chris Honer's production is the variety of styles the piece is presented in, from mime to method, with each choice seemingly just right both for the character and the situation. Tom Khun's essay on Brecht in the program describes him as protean, and the same adjective could be applied to the Director. The way all this comes together into a coherent whole is testament to both his skills, his excellent choice of David Harrower's translation, and the quality of the large ensemble cast.
I did have some (very minor) quibbles with the production. I'm rarely a fan of back-projection, though here it is at least used sparingly and wittily. I also found myself wondering whether the resurrection of a sub-plot involving heroin skewed the production, despite being Brecht's own revision; though I also wondered how Yang Sun's descent could have been so complete without it. And I couldn't help wondering whether the unexpected return of the house lights was accidental, as interesting as the effect was. But Brecht's aim was to make his audiences engage intellectually with his plays, so it could be argued that even these questions are part of the show's success.- The audience enters through the dust and grime of a cement factory where sweating workers despatch heavy bags towards a travelling chute. This instantly establishes a context of capitalist toil: ideal for a play about the difficulty of doing good in a wicked world.
- Her only solution is to adopt the ruthless persona of a male cousin, Shui Ta, whose hard-heartedness enables her to survive.
- The adaptability of capitalism + Brecht's vision of unreconstructed economic slavery begins to look anachronistic?
- The industrial chute that contained cement bags eventually turns to heroin production.
- Highlight the unashamed emotionalism of Brecht's play.
- Wonderful aborted wedding scene, both comic and sad,
- [Shen Te] is also quirkily eccentric
- The final image of Shen Te, trapped inside a glass booth as she is instructed by the escaping gods to carry on being good, also brands itself on the memory as searingly as a Bacon painting.
- And the scene where Horrocks promises to be a tigress for her unborn son while a vagrant rummages through a rubbish bin is as moving as anything in The Deep Blue Sea.
- David Sawer’s music cheekily uses “Chopsticks” in its harsh, barebones arrangements for piano and trumpet
- Switches brilliantly between a girlish Shen Te and a gangsterish Shui Ta
- “In Brecht’s apocalyptic vision, the earth is swarming with ruthless criminals and the desperate poor. The situation is so dire that the gods themselves have come down in search of one good person.”
- From this entertaining contradiction Brecht considers our crazy world: How can individuals live good lives when hardship provokes them into corruption & opportunism ? Can 'good souls' survive against such pressures, or must they sacrifice their 'goodness' to survive ?
- An extraordinary pair of complementary sets oppose each other from each end of the elongated acting area which divides the audience into roughly equal halves, stalls & balcony on each side of the traverse stage.
- 'Realism' on stage is a fallacy & that pretence in performance should be exploited for it's own virtues, so this production is enacted pretty straight for a Brecht play. (No scene-locations or date changes written on notice-boards, for example). 'Why did I never ask myself that?'
- Any play by Brecht might be appropriate for our times but 'The Good Soul,' (formerly 'Person,' in earlier translations & originally, 'Woman') is most apropos right now. Too rarely presented 'when our garden looks rosy,' Brecht is not just rollicking good entertainment, he is as Court Jester to the age, reminding us of our self-destructive failings, a propensity to take popular but wrong paths when 'the path less travelled' promises best for the long journey
Much of the information displayed can be found on the BTB page or following the links below.
http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/838.aspx
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