Turandot

If nothing else, Hampstead Theatre gives us an opportunity to see a version – the British premiere, in fact – of Bertolt Brecht’s last play. A programme note by the play’s translator, Edward Kemp, explains that much of the fairy-story of the Emperor of China’s daughter, Turandot, deciding on a husband by setting her suitors a riddle to solve, was reconceived to reflect tensions and debates in the politics of post-War East Berlin.

Not much of this comes across in performance, but anyone interested in the twentieth century’s most important and influential playwright will not want to miss the final part of his “Eastern” trilogy, after The Good Person of Setzuan and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and a fascinating, if muddled, complement to his other jungle warfare parables, Saint Joan of the Stockyards and Arturo Ui.

Anthony Clark’s production, with terrific new songs by Mia Soteriou (not enough of them after the interval) is continuously engaging and beautifully designed by newcomer Garance Marneur. And it contains a cheekily erotic, silkily inventive performance by Chipo Chung as Turandot, the Emperor of China’s daughter who must find a successful man to marry in the midst of a public sector crisis in the cotton trade.

The story is best known in Puccini’s opera but derives from an Italian version of a Chinese legend translated into German by Schiller in 1801. Brecht re-worked the material as a satire on the intellectuals who run society by selling their opinions, placing the princess in a quandary of pragmatism versus romantic instinct. The developing political bust-ups in the cotton trade rebound on her personal destiny.

It’s fairly funny, but it does meander somewhat, and Clark and Kemp haven’t really succeeded in matching the gang warfare knockabout with the over-long tribunal scenes of the first half and the dry plot developments of the second, in which Col Farrell’s increasingly desperate worker’s representative of the cotton-poor peasants is ironically submerged.

Brecht never revised his play, and it shows. The revival’s adjustments don’t seriously address the new Beijing capitalism to which they allude, and the little red book stuff towards the end is simply embarrassing. But it’s a brave and enjoyable “theatrical” show, with a whole array of sharply edged performances from Michael Mears as a prosperous political leech, Julie Jupp as an all-purpose charlady, David Yip as a smarmy apparatchik, Alex Hassell as a white-suited new capitalist and Gerard Murphy as a pantomimic Emperor doubling as one of the despised tea-room intellectuals.

– Michael Coveney