Turandot
Hampstead Theatre
Do You Know Where Your Daughter Is?
Hackney Empire
Eurobeat
Novello
Why the long wait? Brecht completed his last play, Turandot, in 1953 but only now does it receive its British premiere. This spirited, finely acted production provides the answer. The script is all wonky. Taken from the commedia dell’arte fable that inspired Puccini’s opera, this is a laborious political allegory about an impotent Chinese emperor, his spoiled eldest daughter and a rambling public conference that pitches two symbolic groups against one another, ‘the clothesmakers’, (standing for the Social Democrats), and ‘the clothesless’ (the Communists). The issues Brecht is examining are lost in the past and located two continents away. And his salty wit is all too rarely on show. We hear of a convention of philosophers who meet to determine whether the Yangtze River exists. Weeks of deliberation are interrupted by flash-floods that burst the Yangtze’s banks and sweep the philosophers to their doom.
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