Preview: Mother Courage & Her Children

It’s complicated, but for various reasons, I started reading a lot of Brecht. What drew me to Mother Courage, apart from the titular character herself, was the setting – an endless, pointless, grinding, greedy war, where virtue is defined as whatever is useful to those with power. The cart, too, attracted me – a sort of depressing Tardis, and once I had it in my head how I’d like to present it, I took the plunge.

Brecht didn’t want theatre to be an escape, either for the characters of the audience. He wanted to expose and confront, rather than allow us to forgive our monsters through empathy and identification. His solution was to constantly remind the audience that they were watching a play, not life (this will be obvious from the staging), and to give the actors very little subtext.

This gives his plays the character of a dark pantomime – a directness and refusal to hide behind ambiguity. In any event, if an audience member felt compelled to shout “he’s behind you,” I would take it as a compliment.

Brecht’s central theme was that virtue is impossible in a bad world, and that no war can be ‘good’, since it will always foster cruelty, indifference, and callousness. Thank god we don’t have to worry about any of that anymore…!

Mother Courage herself dominates the play. She is, perhaps fairly, described as “a hyena of the battlefield.” Her confidence and strength are what allows her to prosper, but are also ultimately the source of her downfall. With her come her children: Katryn, the mute, abused daughter; Swiss Cheese, the foolish but honest younger son; Eilif, the eldest and favourite.

Their entourage also, at various stages, acquires a charming but selfish cook, and a chaplain of dubious conviction. And so, the troupe wander the battlefields, encountering monsters and victims of the war along the way.

Time and admin…

War is hell?

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