"Stories of what I see" - Happy, Coming Up, Act 2
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the creative individual of Szechuan
Watching the Young Vic's splendid new production of Brecht's The Good Soul of Szechuan, I was struck by what a remarkably ambiguous "parable" the play is. It's usually taken as a plea for a communist society, showing the iniquities of Capitalism and the impossibility of being a "good" person in a society based on exploitation, the poverty of the many and competition. Certainly, some of the characters in the play - notably the protagonist Shen Te - claim at times that the people who act as vicious, vulgar, pushy and grasping villains are doing so because they are products of their environments, and certainly that environment is shown to be pretty hostile to any flowering of decency. But what struck me forcibly was that Brecht does absolutely nothing in the writing of the vicious characters to support Shen Te's claims that these are potentially "good" people done down by a wicked world. The paupers, thieves, exploiters, addicts and con-merchants who populate the play are all an absolutely awful bunch; when Shen Te assets that her ignorant and boorish lover Yang Sun is that way because of unemployment, we are shown nothing which suggests that Yang Sun has the potential to be anything other than a self-serving pig - Shen Te seems to need to believe in some essential or potential goodness in everyone which there is absolutely no evidence for at all. Except, that is, in Shen Te herself...
In a weird way, The Good Soul of Szechuan could easily be a story cooked up by a right-wing individualist like Ayn Rand. Most of the people portrayed are low-minded, mean-spirited confidence tricksters, complaisant bourgeois dreamers (the gods), simpletons or all-time losers; none of them do anything to better either their situation or that of others in the world. Only Shen Te has the imagination to both perform simple acts of charity and invent the bullying alter-ego Shui Ta in order to ensure that her business and her coming baby don't go under. The play is almost a paean to a spirit of individual creativity which operates beyond good and evil, is willing to "sink down in the slime & embrace the butcher" to change its own world (to co-opt one of Brecht's own lines from elsewhere).
Much of the play is a merry satire on the idea of a transcendent Virtue which calls on people who have to live and breath in the bastard present to be good and only good. The Three Gods that wander through the play, searching for a good soul and admonishing everyone who lets them down, could be portraits of religious missionaries or middle-class moralists, expecting the poor or the underclass to be virtuous or law-abiding in the face of an environment in which to do that would be suicide. Brecht's protagonist, rather than representing transcendent Virtue is canny enough, talented enough, daring enough, capable of opting for amoral Immanent self-preservation. The secret of the play is that, far from condemning her, it shows that it was the most positive thing she could do. But the cost to her self and public image as good, and moreover to her fellow human beings, is enormous.
Nowhere, in the two and a half hours of the play, does Brecht suggest that things could be otherwise. Certainly none of the human beings in the play even think about forming themselves into a community of fellowship and mutual interest. The idea doesn't even cross anyone's mind (perhaps Derrida might suggest that the idea is conspicuous by its absence?). Far from conforming to Nick Cohen's spiteful and ignorant dismissal of Brecht as nothing more than an apologist for communist crimes, The Good Soul of Szechuan shows that he predominantly is - despite the occasional bout of rather clunking editorialising - a complex and ambiguous artist with no answer on offer, a peddler of the question mark which provokes a magnitude of effects (surprise, horror, sadness, depression, inspiration and argument). By now, we all pretty much realise that Brecht was a morally questionable human being, who wheedled and prevaricated around the power elites of his times and appropriated the labour of a number of talented woman writers as his own. And this leads me to suggest that Shen Te is a rather naked self-portrait of the artist, expected to be "good" by the gods who sit in judgement on him, harbouring completely unproven theories about essential or potential human goodness, capable of small acts of charity but also able to split himself in two and act in the most monstrous and immoral ways in order to stay afloat, alive, in the game. Brecht was himself that whore of Szechuan, that odd soul who in the mass of sinking and stinking humanity manages to keeps itself afloat not through moral behaviour but through its own creative force.
In its strange way, The Good Soul of Szechuan is an exhortation of forgiveness towards arch-individualists, their crimes and inhumanities - how could they do any different, the world being what it is? This marvellous, disorientating, disillusioning, inspiring play is served wonderfully in a vigorous and imaginative production by the always splendid Richard Jones, with music by David Sawer which sends you skipping in discordant delight out into the savage night.