Meng challenges audiences with Brecht's play

A Chinese director pulls together a cast of Australian actors to perform a German play in English. It would attract theatergoers in any of their home countries, and soon audiences in Beijing and Shanghai will get their turn to see it.

The Good Person of Szechuan by Bertolt Brecht, co-produced by Melbourne's Malthouse Theater and Chinese avant-garde director Meng Jinghui, premiered in Melbourne in July and will run at the National Theater of China from Oct 29 to Nov 1, as part of the Beijing International Theater Festival. It will be presented at the Shanghai International Arts Festival on Nov 4 and 5.

Meng, 50, was invited to present his trademark work, Rhinoceros in Love, at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2011. Marion Potts, Malthouse Theater's artistic director, was impressed by it and initiated a co-production. Meng saw an exciting challenge in this play, as he had never done Brecht's work.

The gods come down to Earth to find out if there is a good person in Szechuan (Sichuan). It turns out that only Shen Te, the kindhearted prostitute, offers them shelter. The gods give her a reward: a chance to open a small tobacco store. But it seems she cannot survive just by her goodness. She has to develop an alter ego - her pushy male cousin, Shui Ta - to run it efficiently. Then, of course, things get interesting.

Set in the Sichuan of his imagination, Brecht (1898-1956) wrote the story in Finland in 1943 after fleeing Nazi Germany. As a Marxist playwright, Brecht wrote it as an indictment of both fascism and the capitalism he saw that rewarded self-interest and deceit while pure goodness cannot survive.

"Politics, education and entertainment are all part of Brecht's complexity," Meng says, adding that he chose the play because its exploration of good and bad, virtue and vice, exploitation and poverty, is relevant even today.

"It's a universal theme that makes it relevant to a broad audience," says Meng, a rock star of China's theater scene. "No matter if you are in Melbourne or Beijing, Berlin or Tokyo, you can appreciate Brecht's moral fable."

Meng paints his surrealist Sichuan as a dark and drug-addled cesspit and his adaptation is an "even darker and more violent" version of Brecht's already bleak tale. He said no to "obvious Chinese props, declining even to put Sichuan's famous hotpot on the stage.

"Yes, materialism is rampant and young people in China today are far more individualistic. But the message I want to give is that money is not important but that the future is."

The cast is extraordinary, he says. "They have good imagination, an amazing energy and they use it very well."

Portraying Shen Te is Australia's burlesque queen Moira Finucane.

This is the first play she has done since 1991. At the time, Finucane had been working in federal politics. Trained as an environmental scientist, she was testing new ground. She sees this return to theater as pushing boundaries in the heady world of burlesque.

The main challenge is the language. Meng's English is not strong, and the cast doesn't speak Mandarin.

"But as long as everyone is clear on the big directions, the big vision, problems are solved one by one," he says.

Shen Lin, a professor at the Central Academy of Drama, is eager to see Meng's work.

"It's risky to stage Brecht, who is a complicated combination of thoughts and entertainment. Meng is certainly the kind of person who would like to take risks, does not fear failure and is committed to taking things to the edge," says Shen.

chenjie@chinadaily.com.cn