A Parable of Morality and Sympathy
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A Parable of Morality and Sympathy

A Chinese play ‘The Good Woman of Schezwan’ accounts generosity, goodness of heart and a sort of golden myth

Post by on Tuesday, July 6, 2021

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LITERARY REVIEW
 
Prelude
The Good Woman of Schezwan (1938-1939) was written at the beginning of World War – II at a time when Nazism was at its full bloom and zenith in Germany. This play reveals Bertolt Brecht’s gymnastic adaptability, virtuosity and determination. In this play the epic theatre playwright Brecht writes about the good Woman of Schezwan province whose capital is China where people are poverty stricken. This play was first published in 1948 as one of the Brecht’s ‘two parables for the theatre’. This play shows generosity and goodness of heart and exhorts a golden sort of myth. It is a Chinese morality play or a play of sympathy which ensures a happy ending for all good people are rewarded eventually. His aim of this play is a radical transformation of theatre into a productive criticism of society.
This play is portrayed by characters like Wong (water seller) not only the internal part of the play but also a commentator and rapporteur to the three Chinese goads about Shen Teh, Mrs MiTzu (land lady of tobacco shop), Mrs Shin (shopkeeper and neighbor of Shen Teh), ShuiTa (A fabricated cousin of Shen Teh), ShuFu (A rich barber), old couple (owner of carpet shop). Mrs Yang and her son Yang Sun (an unemployed and degenerate airman without aircraft), Lin To (carpenter), policeman and the central character around which the whole play revolves, that is Shen Teh, the Good Woman of Schezwan.
 
Epic Theater and Bertolt Brecth
Bertolt Brecth, the most renowned, elite, prominent and distinguished German playwright did a pioneering work in a new kind of technique called ‘realism-narrative realism’ which subsequently becomes Brecht’s starting point of writing. He also used the theatre as a weapon for making class attitudes with the aim of breaking through middle class attitudes. He introduced assiduously the cabaret tradition in his theatre and emphasized beautifully in semi-underworld figure and their fierce conflicts. He was the inventor of ‘Epic theatre and Marxist dialect’. He not only expounded the theory but also wrote what was probably the first illustrating his theory. 
His very important aspect of epic theatre was to present a broad historical sweep in his play. Brecht was also involved consistently and emotionally in techniques like ‘catharsis through terror-and-pity’ social gesture, psychological ebb and distancing or alienation in his plays because his real purpose was to enable the audience to watch events on the stage in a detached and un-personal manner, and to ask a torrent of questions arising form what they had witnessed in a detached and un-studded way so as to form their own independent judgment.
 
Dialectical Theatre
His protagonist and systematic style not only worked in historicizing drama but till he died in 1956 as there are evidences he moved strategically towards a new concept of theatre which he called ‘dialeke-tisches theatre or dialectical theatre’. 
 
Epilogue of the Play 
The Good Woman of Schezwan presents the issue of poverty and riches, of worker and master class, in an extreme form. On the other hand, its moral is much more indeterminate. In this play three Chinese gods who come in search of good men find none except the prostitute and destitute Shen Teh and rewarded her with money which she used to setup a tobacco shop. Later, she falls in love with an out of work and un-employed airman Yang Sun, a ruthlessly to whom she still shows complete devotion and here again her goodness leads to disaster. In her dilemma, she sees no way out but to disguise her self as a male cousin. As ShuiTa, she helps both the poor and a lover, setting up a factory which provides her work and wages; but in so doing, she forgoes almost all her charity and her mental plight in even worse. 
At length, she is arrested and ShuTa for the supposed of murder of Shen Teh. The gods enter the court to try the case and where upon, she reveals that she is her self Shen Teh. The gods, however, are unconcerned. A sparing use of ShuiTa, they suggest her that goodness and generosity is rewarded in the heavens. They then return to the heaven in pink clouds of glory, leaving Shen Teh writing in her agonies of conscience. There is a strong temptation to respond and to see this play as exploring a literal interpretation of the commandment to love one’s neighbors. The play is tragic in the sense that it shows the utter impossibility of human goodness. In other words, this is essentially a picture play of competitive society, its problems are those of capitalism and not of modern communist China and with this an entirely new distancing attitude is gained. In short this play microscopically depicts that almost un-attainable absolute should be replaced by more human qualities.
 
 
(Author is Rafiabad-based Rising Kashmir Columnist, Freelancer and Teacher by profession. He can be mailed at: manzurakash@yahoo.co.in)