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    Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht

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    Kanika Sharma
    The play The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht revolves around the character of Shen Teh, a prostitute who is seen as good by the gods. However, staying good and running her tobacco shop proves difficult. She creates a male cousin, Shui Ta, to help with the challenges while staying in business. The play uses these characters to question the very concept of goodness and criticize capitalism. It aims to alienate the audience and prevent catharsis by showing the complexities of survival for characters in an unjust system.

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    Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht

    Uploaded by

    Kanika Sharma
    570 views4 pages
    The play The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht revolves around the character of Shen Teh, a prostitute who is seen as good by the gods. However, staying good and running her tobacco shop proves difficult. She creates a male cousin, Shui Ta, to help with the challenges while staying in business. The play uses these characters to question the very concept of goodness and criticize capitalism. It aims to alienate the audience and prevent catharsis by showing the complexities of survival for characters in an unjust system.

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    The play The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht revolves around the character of Shen Teh, a prostitute who is seen as good by the gods. However, staying good and running her tobacco shop proves difficult. She creates a male cousin, Shui Ta, to help with the challenges while staying in business. The play uses these characters to question the very concept of goodness and criticize capitalism. It aims to alienate the audience and prevent catharsis by showing the complexities of survival for characters in an unjust system.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    570 views4 pages

    Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht

    Uploaded by

    Kanika Sharma
    The play The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht revolves around the character of Shen Teh, a prostitute who is seen as good by the gods. However, staying good and running her tobacco shop proves difficult. She creates a male cousin, Shui Ta, to help with the challenges while staying in business. The play uses these characters to question the very concept of goodness and criticize capitalism. It aims to alienate the audience and prevent catharsis by showing the complexities of survival for characters in an unjust system.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
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    The play discusses the concept of goodness and questions what it truly means to be good in a capitalist society.

    The play is set in China and revolves around the character of Shen Teh who tries to stay good while running a business but struggles with the demands of capitalism.

    Goodness is shown to be complex with different interpretations. Shen Teh represents both good and evil. The gods have an abstract view of goodness.

    B.El.

    Ed III Year

    English II (O3.1)

    Task: Assignment

    Name: Nikita Yadav

    Roll No. 16/1308

    Topic : Concept of goodness discussed in the play “The Good Person of Szechwan”

    The Good Woman of Setzuan, drama, by Bertolt Brecht,produced in 1943 and published in 1953 as Der gute Mensch von

    Sezuan. The title has many English-language variants, including The Good Person of Szechwan and The Good Soul of

    Szechuan. The play is set in China between World War I and World War II.'Brecht's dark, dazzling world-view...makes an

    absolutely devastating impact.

    The play is fuelled by the brilliant perception that everyone requires such a dual or split personality to survive. 'Three

    gods come to earth hoping to discover one really good person. No one can be found until they meet Shen Te, a prostitute

    with a heart of gold.Brecht's parable of good and evil was first performed in 1943 and remains one of his most popular

    and frequently produced plays worldwide.

    Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, first performed in 1943 in Switzerland, revolves around the character of Shen

    Teh/Shui Ta, playing on the idea of goodness. Shen Teh is good, or at least that is what one is supposed to see her

    as, and Shui Ta is bad. The definition of goodness that the play attempts to project then depends upon the reaction of

    the audience to the action on stage, based on their subjective perceptions of it. Wang the water-seller opens the play

    with the Prologue, searching for lodgings for the Gods that have descended upon the city of Szechwan to search for

    goodness.

    Shen Teh the town prostitute agrees to offer it. The Gods perceive it as a sure sign of goodness, and give her a thousand

    silver dollars as a compensation for their lodging. She uses this money to buy herself a tobacconist’s shop. Running the

    shop and staying «good» turns out to be trickier than she imagined, and the shop soon turns into a poorhouse that

    attracts vagrants, crime and police supervision.


    As Brecht states, talking about the epic theatre in his text Brecht on Theatre, the play seems to «not in fact speaking in

    the name of morality, but in that of the victims». The flawed system has turned most characters into victims of a

    capitalistic world. As far as the mainstream notions are concerned, Shen Teh is «good». Shen Teh dons the costume of a

    man, turning into her fictional cousin Shui Ta, to shield herself against all that.

    This protagonist, who is the site of both good, and the evil, problematizes the very notions of goodness, the notions of

    what it is the Gods were looking for. As McCollough observes,«we should recognize that what the Gods mean by

    goodness is something more than good actions». They seem to have only an abstract notion of goodness, only a hunch

    about what they are looking for. These Gods get black eyes from being a part of a human brawl, lose their legs in

    foxtrots, and end up barefoot with visibly tattered garbs.

    They get exhausted, and show symptoms of prolonged travel and other nasty human experiences. Brecht seems to be

    using these Gods to problematize the concept of religion. The idea of goodness is then one that has been isolated, and

    the characters as well as the audience are left grappling with it.

    A water-seller by profession, he seems to have a soft spot for Shen Teh. Seemingly the only "good" person in the

    play, who never takes an "evil" stand, he fails to impress the Gods. " "How they’d all shout give me water/ How they’d

    fight for my good graces/ And I’d make their further treatment/ Go by how I liked their faces. The names, of the people

    and that of the town, are suggestive of the setting being Chinese.

    But the semi-Europeanized setting of the play point that the play is set in Brecht’s "here and now". While on one hand it

    seems to be an abstract for a setting where rampant exploitation occurs, on the other it seems a signifier of success and

    prosperity, pre-dating even the onset of capitalism, as Kumar notes. "What has business to do with an upright and

    honorable life?" asks the First God in the second Interlude. Having opened a factory in Mr. Shu Fu’s place, Shui Ta is the

    embodiment of this brutal business instinct.

    The tobacco factory he establishes is a success in terms of making him money, and thus cementing his social place. The

    idea of goodness here is then not directly critiqued, but critiqued by the audience’s reaction to the action on
    stage. "Brecht’s techniques are geared to hold a mirror to our face showing us how capitalism makes us do things that

    we can not ethically do in the name of survival". Watching these characters fight for survival, "the spectators are no

    longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience by means of uncritical empathy with the characters in a play," says

    Brecht.

    As Peter Brooker notes in his essay Key Words in Brecht’s Theory and Practice of Theatre,Brecht’s theatre represents

    that the "puzzles of the world are not solved but shown".Brecht, unlike the common tendency which has been to empty

    gest of any social content,places the social context in the gest, in the gestures. He seems, as Brooker notes, to be aiming

    at a socially situated performance, rather than at penetrating a character’s inner life. He doesn’t care if Shen Teh is a

    prostitute, he cares only about the social implications it would generate for the play.

    Gestus, and Verfremdung then historicize the incidents portrayed, producing a jolt of surprise and illumination as "the

    familiar and predictable" were not only seen afresh but "seen through". Arguably the most philosophical song in the

    play, it exposes a Marxist-leftist point of view, projecting oppression as a never ending cycle, linked here specifically to

    socio-economic frameworks. These resources are unequally divided, with the rich having a lot more than they would

    ever need, and the poor struggling to survive. It is this imbalance that causes the problems in a society, and which has

    been analyzed via a Marxist critique of the play.

    Not only does it speak for a sense of ‘divide and rule’ amongst people where solidarity must rather exist, but also of a

    sense of betrayal in an environment where everyone is watching only their own back. This aims to raise serious

    questions about the ideals of "goodness" and the meaning of it, by alienating the audience/reader. The play keeps the

    audience/reader from reaching catharsis. Unlike Shen Teh, Mother Courage is not depicted as an inherently noble

    character.

    "The three Gods ," as McCullough notes, "function as the intermediary between heaven’s abstract ethics and the world

    of Szechwan, where attempts at goodness require the temper of pragmatism if survival is to be maintained". They seem

    only to be representatives of religious conventions and conservatism, who, at last disappear without having solved the

    problems at hand.
    References:
    1. Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Person of Szechwan. Methuen Drama Edition ed. London: Bloomsbury PLC, 2013.
    Print.
    2. Brecht, Bertolt. "Brecht on Theatre." Modern European Drama: Background Prose Reading. New Delhi:
    Worldview Publications, 2012. Print.
    3. Brooker, Peter. "Key Words in Brecht's Theory and Practice of Brecht's Theatre." Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
    4. McCollough, Christopher. "The Good Person of Szechwan." Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
    5. Kumar, Sanjay. “The Good Person of Szechwan.” Delhi

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