I think it’s fifteen years since we’ve seen a major production of this Brecht play in London, at the Young Vic with Jane Horrocks as the ‘good soul’. This Headlong tour, a new version by Nina Segal (credited as ‘translater’ but much more of an ‘adapter’) has called in at the Lyric Hammersmith for a month. Though Richard Jones’ 2008 production was radical, this ‘new version’ of Brecht’s parable is more problematic.
Three gods arrive in Szechwan looking for shelter, but like everywhere else all they find is greed, dishonesty and selfishness, until they come across young prostitute Shen Teh who has an inherent charity. She is rewarded with a gift which allows her to buy a small tobacco shop, which also enables the gods to test her goodness. Sadly, the shop becomes a magnet for lowlife. She eventually invents a cousin Shui Ta and disguises herself as him when she needs to deal with the undesirables, though this becomes more and more frequent. The double life leads to accusations that she has killed her cousin and she ends up being tried by the gods, who created this situation in the first place.
The problem is that Anthony Lau’s production has so much stage business that Brecht’s parable gets buried and it becomes a cartoonish story with little substance. Though it has a sense of fun, frankly, I was often bored. It veered so far from Brecht that for me it lost its way altogether. Georgia Lowe’s design is playful, everyone arriving down slides, through shining poles at the sides or from below through pools of plastic balls. The performers have to work hard to cut through and tell a story with all that is going on. Even at less than two hours playing time, it outstayed its welcome, trying way too hard to be accessible and relevant to a young, contemporary audience. To be fair, though, they looked like they were having a lot more fun than me!
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