The Good Person Of Szechwan Analysis Essay Example

virtuoso interpretation, but its rigorous control. For its performance, the text is no longer a basis of that performance, but a grid on which, in the form of new formulations, the gains of that performance are marked…”1 and so Bertolt Brecht’s theory of Epic Theatre transforms into its praxis in his play The Good Person of Szechwan.The Good Person of Szechwan is a purely Marxist play that deals with the social conditions of its milieu and how the people who are put in those situations react to it and towards one another. The major theme being that of survival in a world that is ruled not by goodness of character but by the evil and corruption of the society.

The juxtaposition of poverty with plentitude is a leit motif in the play. Wang’s ‘The Water Seller’s Song In The Rain’ brigns forth this juxtaposition beautifully when he laments, “I sell water. Who will taste it? -Who would want to in this weather? All my labour has been wastedFetching these few pints together. I stand shouting by my Water! And nobody thinks it Worth stopping and buying Or greedily drinks it.

”2 Since its rainy season and there is plenty of water no one bothers buying the water from Wang and this plentitude becomes poverty for Wang. We start to pity Wang’s character when we realize that he is a proletariat and is burdened by poverty, but Brecht alienates us from Wang’s character by showing us his cheating and swindling side so that we rationalize his character and see him as the representative of the proletariat ideology of swindling and cheating.There is no Bourgeois enemy present

in the play. The problem is within the proletariat and not amongst the proletariat and bourgeois. The problems that Shen Teh or the other characters face are due to their social conditions.

The province of Szechwan can be seen as a microcosm of what is happening all over the world.Throughout the play there is constant reference to “hunger. ” Hunger is seen as annihilating honor. Shen Teh’s hesitancy to take the God’s in is because she has an empty stomach. She says “…I’m afraid that a rumbling stomach is no respecter of persons. 3 The motif of hunger and poverty can also be seen in Brecht’s other play The Life of Galileo.

The play starts with Galileo saying “Put the milk on table…”4 and Andrea replying “Mother says we must pay the milkman, if we don’t he’ll be describing a circle round us, Signor Galilei”5 and later on when Galileo says “…and I like to eat decently. It’s when I’m eating I get most inspiration. A rotten age. They haven’t paid me as much as the man who drives their wine-carts. ”6 We are always reminded of the juxtaposition of plentitude with poverty.

The play is dialectical in its split between Shen Teh’s self fulfillment and Shui Ta’s self preservation. It is the “inevitable clash between desire and fact and as the paradox of ends and means. These are two sides of the same coin. Shen Teh’s wish to be generous must employ Shui Ta’s profiteering meanness, or else she would be deprived of her charitable self. ”7 Prosperity is associated with lack of goodness and “social conditions twist the natural goodness of human beings into

opposites”8 and hence if Shen Teh wants to prosper then she needs to give into Shui Ta’s calculating nature.

In The Good Person of Szechwan we have constant interruptions that are brought about by the musical interludes and all these songs work to alienate the audience from the play and to make them question the situation being presented in front of them. They are made to question the worth of Shen Teh’s goodness as it leaves her not ennobled but economically emaciated. Walter Benjamin says that, “the interrupting of action is one of the principle concerns of epic theatre. Therein lies the formal achievements of Brecht’s songs with their crude, heart rendering refrains. 9 and hence ‘The Water Seller’s Song In The Rain’ comes just after the love scene between Shen Teh and Yang Sun, disrupting the audience from getting involved in the play and again bringing their attention to the dialectics between poverty and plentitude.

Brecht says that “in the epic theatre moral arguments only took second place. Its aim was less to moralize than to observe. ”10 So we see that Shen Teh’s goodness is constantly thwarted by the social circumstances and harsh necessities of survival in a competitive world but no moralizing comments are made.The play begins on a note of despair and ends with one. For Shen Teh to survive it is necessary that Shui Ta also survives.

The God’s in the play are ignorant, humanized and a satire on the hegemony in Christianity, questioning the absolutism of Christianity in the early twentieth Century. Instead of one god head we are presented with three Gods and none of them can do anything

to lift Shen Teh out of the drudgery that she is a part of even though she is good.In the trial scene the gods are seen as nothing but impostors, their omniscience and all powerful stature is questioned. The idea of justice is questioned, deconstructed and done away with.

Neither is virtue rewarded nor vice punished, instead vice is seen as a means to an end. Shui Ta is not punished for any of the crimes and Shen Teh is not rewarded for her goodness. Brecht here blends divine justice with legal justice by making the Gods don on the attire of the magistrate to mock at divine justice.It is a Marxist onslaught on the institutionalization of religion.

In his other play The Caucasian Chalk Circle we have the character of Azdak whose method of delineating legal justice is more serious in purpose and intent as compared to the three Gods here who appear as mere fools. One is forced to question if justice is being delayed or if there is no concept of justice in an industrial world. The open ended-ness of the trial scene erodes the moralistic nature and it prises upon the mind of the audience and affects change.Brecht in all his plays comments on “Jetztzeit”, a term that Walter Benjamin coined for the presence of “now” in Brechtian plays. According to Walter Benjamin, “history for Brecht was an ever present arena, never as with Lukacs a thing of past” and hence we see that Mother Courage and her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan or The Life of Galileo all have topical references in the World War I and II, the

failure of the Russian Revolution/Communism/Dictatorship and questioning of the viability and feasibility of science in a post Hiroshima-Nagasaki world, respectively.Also epic theatre is literarized.

“The literarization of theatre by means of verbal formulas, posters, captions, is intended to, and will, make what is shown on the stage unsensational. ”11 The performance is not aimed to draw the audience into the play but to make them stand at the periphery so that they question the bourgeoisie ideology and break free from it, so that the proletariat is emancipated and socialism can be constructed.