First honk, then applaud

Turandot
Hampstead Theatre

Do You Know Where Your Daughter Is?
Hackney Empire

Eurobeat
Novello

Why the long wait? Brecht completed his last play, Turandot, in 1953 but only now does it receive its British premiere. This spirited, finely acted production provides the answer. The script is all wonky. Taken from the commedia dell’arte fable that inspired Puccini’s opera, this is a laborious political allegory about an impotent Chinese emperor, his spoiled eldest daughter and a rambling public conference that pitches two symbolic groups against one another, ‘the clothesmakers’, (standing for the Social Democrats), and ‘the clothesless’ (the Communists). The issues Brecht is examining are lost in the past and located two continents away. And his salty wit is all too rarely on show. We hear of a convention of philosophers who meet to determine whether the Yangtze River exists. Weeks of deliberation are interrupted by flash-floods that burst the Yangtze’s banks and sweep the philosophers to their doom. The rest of the play feels like an uneasy and whimsical piece of escapism. That’s understandable. By the early Fifties Brecht had settled in East Germany where his work was being subsidised by a regime whose actions had begun to appall and horrify him. In the year Turandot was written, the government demanded higher productivity from the workers who took to the streets in protest. Their demonstration was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks. Brecht responded courageously, eloquently. ‘Ossified officials, hostile but cowering,’ he wrote, ‘have begun to govern against the population.’ And his satirical poem ‘The Solution’ ended with the facetious suggestion that the government should dissolve the people and elect another. Brecht’s stature fully justifies a production of his final play. What a shame it turns out to be such a creaky, quirky curiosity.