The Good Soul: ‘Are there any good people left?’
Director, Chris Honer, and Leading Lady, Poppy Miller, talk to TheModernCaveman about their recent production of The Good Soul of Szechuan, which took Manchester’s iconic Library Theatre by storm last November:
The Good Soul of Szechuan is possibly Brecht’s most famous masterpiece; but do you think you could summarise the play’s message in a soundbite?
Chris: The Good Soul is a parable about how hard it is to be a good person in a bad world.
Poppy: Well, there are certainly loads of questions but no clear message! The characters live in a dog eat dog world with no care from the state. Then these three Gods arrive and are desperate to ask “Are there any good people left in the world?” Of course, if there are, the Gods are doing their jobs properly and can happily go back to heaven. But the lives of the human characters raise questions like, “How can we be good when the world makes it difficult?” and “If being bad means getting your own way, why shouldn’t we be bad?”
This was the first time The Library has produced Brecht in four years. Why revive this tradition now?
C: The Good Soul of Szechuan is a play all about materialism, poverty and greed; it seemed like a very apposite play to produce in this economic climate. Also, Brecht is a brilliant story teller.
Poppy, your character adopts the guise of a male alter-ego for half of the production. Did you enjoy your time as a man or was it a challenge?
P: It was brilliant fun! Of course, it was challenging. But it was made easier by the fact that I was playing a woman pretending to be a man, rather than a male. I’ve had to do a lot of movement work on male archetypes. I’ve been watching men walk around Manchester! There was this one great guy really giving it the whole shoulder swagger, I think he might have been off his head.
You had quite a large cast of 15 actors. What was it like working with such a sizeable number of people?
P: Everyone was so interesting; everyone had their own story to tell. When we came together it was a ready-made world, which was great because that’s exactly what the play’s about.
What were the challenges of visually recreating the bustle of Szechuan Province on stage in the basement of a library in Central Manchester?
C: More than anything the complexity of Brecht’s story-telling made this very difficult. The Good Soul is set in a large number of locations; the city streets, a tobacco shop, an opium den, a court room. We had to develop a really unique set made out of movable screens that could be reassembled smoothly so that scene changes didn’t stop the action of the play. The screens were plain so the set looked like it could be any industrial city outside of the West. Brecht made it expressly clear that he didn’t think the set should be covered in Chinoiserie.
Finally, could you describe The Good Soul of Szechuan in three words?
P: Feisty, Quirky and Impressive.
Further Information about The Library Theatre’s November 2009 Production of The Good Soul of Szechuan is available at: http://www.librarytheatre.com/whatson/whatson_details.php/7/2009/1211/the-good-soul-of-szechuan/
