Artistic Director Ong Keng Sen, reflects on his production, Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Sezuan, in the following interview. The Good Person of Sezuan will premiere on 26 September 2009 in Linz at Landestheater, Kammerspiele for Linz 2009 European Capital of Culture.

For more information, visit: http://www.linz09.at/en/termin-2122381/der_gute_mensch_von_sezuan.html

 

Is Brecht's THE GOOD PERSON OF SEZUAN known in the Chinese-speaking culture area?

Generally Brecht is very well known in Asia.  He is one of the few playwrights of the German-speaking world who continues to play an important role in influencing the theatre of Asia.  I see "Sezuan" as a fantasy of china and yet it is clearly German, a product of European history and life.  That’s the power of the work.  Chinese speaking cultures tend to be very respectful of the work as modern theatre arrived in china in the 20th century through Ibsen, Chekov and Brecht.  However I dare say that Brecht stands out as his parables often seem to directly strike at one of the core struggles in Asia and China.  I can generalise this as the tension between the individual and society; this emerges even before Brecht's ideological positions.  Ultimately "good person of Sezuan" is a profound journey of Chinese elements across to Europe, harnessed by a German writer who saw the opportunity of CHINA to express his viewpoints.  But this journey is not complete until we look at how Asian and Chinese artists today, harness Brecht to speak to their diverse homelands and even to Europe, a revitalised dialogue 60 years later.  And of course, these conversations go on, one influencing the other after, across geography and time.  

 

What was your first encounter with THE GOOD PERSON OF SEZUAN like?

I read it earlier as a play in my teenage years.  I saw a wonderful production of it in 1990 in the national theatre in London.  This was directed by Deborah Warner and starred Fiona Shaw.  And then I thought - Wow, ok that’s the verfremdungseffekt!  But it was in my postgraduate years in New York City that I thoroughly encountered Brecht again, particularly in his own writings, in a short organum of theatre etc.  He spoke a lot to me, I realised that his writing completely agreed with my belief of theatre.  Somehow I was making Brechtian theatre without realising it, especially in my approach to reinventing classical and traditional Asian theatre.

 

Which elements/parts/levels seemed familiar, which seemed unusual?

I was reminded by going back to the German translation that “gute mensch” means good person.  Somehow I had always read the English translation as "The Good Woman of Sezuan".  The gender element started to take on a very unusual perspective for me.  Is gender fixed or stable?  Can a human being decide one day to be a woman or a man without sliding out of those gender categorisations unconsciously, irrationally, emotionally?  Can we live parallel lives as completely separate existences?  What had been so clear for me in all those years was that Shen Te can only be a woman and then suddenly as I stared at the German title, it became less clear.  What if Shen Te / Shui Ta is not approached as a black and white didactic but the character becomes a hermaphrodite, a hybrid?  I started to relate this to the verfremdungseffekt, 'to make strange the familiar'.

 

Why is it interesting for you as a director coming from the Chinese culture area to put a European play on stage that is set into an imaginary, fictional china?

I believe that Brecht's fantasy allowed me to be equally fantastical.  Through his imagination, he arrived at a sharper reality.  He provided a pathway for me to do the same.  I embrace the hybrid realities in his work as I am a strong believer in hybridity as a way to speak of the complexities of today.  I myself am a product of these different realities, different influences.  There is very little authenticity left in this world today but I believe that we can continue to create particular personal realities which hint at the worlds that we live in today.  

 

What can today's relevance of THE GOOD PERSON OF SEZUAN be?

I like to see Brecht's fantasy as allowing me to look at contemporary life today.  I find it completely amazing that he invented a character Shen Te who created an alter ego Shui Ta to exist in the universe of the play: in order to be good, one has to be bad.  The parallel in our contemporary life is the avatars that some of us create in virtual reality as we play games with each other, chat with each other.  These avatars are our alter egos today.  In our virtual second life, we seek out moments of intimacy; we escape our real life.  This is the reality of many individuals in contemporary Asia, Europe and around the world. Human beings enter the fantasy of the net to play out illusions of self, to find sustenance in the face of drudgery, to seek salvation, to live.  People who don’t know one another save each other daily as their avatars meet and interact.  Sometimes, individuals even bring their avatars out into daily life, from second life to real life.  Ordinary office workers meet as communities, dress up in town squares on the weekends, fantasise together - cosplay or costume role play.  This trend began prominently in Japan and spread rapidly throughout Asia, china and even Europe.  The real and virtual meet.

I wanted to start off creating an image of China today.  Contemporary China is exemplified by huge technological advancements which has enabled life and also imprisoned life.  In a decade, the development that Europe and the US experienced in a century is compressed into China and many other Asian metropolises as well.  Human beings are living in a society of advanced communications today but what is the quality of these communications?  As we skype and chat with each other across time zones, what was impossible even a decade ago is now possible.  We use video cams to track each other with our laptops, we strive to grasp intimacy in chat rooms even though we are far separated.