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Friday 9 January 2009

Parisian decadence

Marguerite (Haymarket), The Good Soul of Szechuan (Young Vic), Under Milk Wood (Tricycle)

Brecht is the Centrepoint of 20th-century drama. He ought to be knocked down but he’s been listed. That’s the doubter’s view anyway. But ever since the Young Vic’s sensationally funny production of The Wedding last year I’ve had my doubts about doubting Brecht. There are flashes of poetry, humanity and humour in his work that make him worth looking at. The Good Soul of Szechuan is an ambitious political fairytale set in China for reasons that are never clear. Shen Te, a tart with a heart, gives up prostitution and opens a shop with cash from a chance inheritance. Dull but nice, she wants to be kind to everyone she comes across, so of course she gets ripped off and taken advantage of. Enter her ‘cousin’, an effeminate hard-talking thug who tries to save her from her exploiters. Brecht is on to something here — is altruism compatible with capitalism? — but the result is a flaccid, overpopulated provincial epic which he knew perfectly well wasn’t right. He edited and reworked it constantly. Not enough, though. When not boring us with vapid melodrama, he strives for significance with lines like, ‘Toughness and inhumanity are nothing if not absolute’. The structure of an aphorism, the content of a platitude. Do you remember Amélie, the worst French film ever made? It’s like that rewritten by a politics student with his head full of ideas that are bigger than his ability to express them. Jane Horrocks is pointy, sweet and sincere and plays Shen Te as a sexy little elf, but the rest of the company lag behind her in charm and warmth. And some of them (I shan’t give names) are as bad as I’ve ever seen.

A return to Under Milk Wood is like a visit to a childhood holiday beach, full of dependable surprises and half-remembered pleasures. The London Theatre Company (they’re from South Wales despite their name) have been together since the 1960s and their easy familiarity with each other brings out the best in Dylan Thomas’s script. This is a richly entertaining production of a macabre and inspired piece of magic written in haste in America shortly before the author was visited by one of his own characters, Evans the Death.

More articles from: Lloyd Evans | this section

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