TURANDOT. To 4 October.

London.

TURANDOT
by Bertolt Brecht translated by Edward Kemp.

Hampstead Theatre To 4 October 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm & 24 Sept, 1 Oct 2.30pm.
Audio-described 27 Sept. 3pm.
Captioned/Post-show discussion with speech to text transcription: 30 Sept.
Runs 2hr 30min One interval.

TICKETS: 010 7722 9301.
www.hampsteadtheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 September.

Last, if not greatest, of the Brecht canon.
Turandot is a serially unfinished work. But whereas Puccini (working via an unlikely Schiller piece from Carlo Gozzi’s 1762 comedy, based on a 50-year old story by one Francois Petis de la Croix)) never composed his opera’s final scene, Brecht left his last play with various drafts, from which Edward Kemp has carved this version, reduced from the large scale Brecht designed for his gigantically-funded Berliner Ensemble.

Brecht had no idea it would be his last play. In his late-fifties, he was working on preparations for the company’s influential 1956 London visit when he suddenly died, in his own late-fifties. So the references to earlier work are no summation. Arturo Ui’s arson scene is the clearest, while thematically the story of cotton being hoarded to raise prices, and the instruction not to delay a major mission for small victories recall the earlier, didactic The Measures Taken.

Turandot is set in ancient China, where Gerard Murphy’s emperor sits on a throne briefly occupied, in Anthony Clark’s production, by a despised cleaning-woman. Initially half-dressed, always childishly spoilt and greedy, this emperor’s colourful oriental costume makes him a plaything of the politicians and business men whose modern attire becomes increasingly obvious.

But central to the satire, where competing forces (an unbrotherly attempted coup also recalls The Caucasian Chalk Circle) work against the threat of an approaching popular revolution, are the intellectuals, the ‘Teliu’ whose name suggests (in Kemp’s version of Brecht’s scornful term) both ‘intellectual’ and a dominating ‘tell you’.

There are Higher and Lower Teliu, the latter hawking arguments and philosophy round the market-place. It easily suggests a lumbering satire when shorn of its immediate contexts, both Brecht’s scorn for opinion-makers as government stooges in 1930s Germany and the allegations two decades on about his own complicity with East Germany’s Communist rulers amid popular unrest, typified in the Boss of Gunter Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising.

But Clark and his company provide sharp-etched scenes and if their skill can’t make Brecht’s Turandot a major rediscovery, it remains an intriguing rediscovery as coda to the career of a once-lionised (almost sanctified) playwright.

Emperor of China/Wang: Gerard Murphy.
Turandot: Chipo Chung.
Yao Yel/Ki Leh/Gu: Michael Mears.
Prime Minister/Nu Shan/Music: Jamie Newall.
Fi Jei: David Yip.
War Minister/Munka Du/Wen: Daniel York.
Charlady/Ma Gogh: Julie Jupp.
Hi Weh/Kiung: Mia Siteriou.
Ragged/Shu Meh/Su: Gemma Chan.
Gogher Gogh: Alex Hassall.
Sen: Col Farrell.
Er Fuh: Thomas Bailey/Tina Luo.

Director: Anthony Clark.
Designer: Garance Marneur.
Lighting: James Farncombe.
Sound: Steve Brown.
Composer/Musical Director: Mia Soteriou.
Fight director: Kate Waters.
Assistant director: Elizabeth Newman.
Assistant designer: Marie Duche.

2008-09-19 09:57:21