Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) by Bertolt Brecht
Authors: Bertolt Brecht
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Richard Schechner’s with the Performance Group off-Broadway – seems to have done so more because of its original treatment of the audience than by its conception and performance of the text; it became a vivid, sharply biting Courage experience, almost a happening. The odd thing is that this overall failure in the professional theatre has not impaired the play’s critical and academic reputation, nor even its attraction for amateurs, to whom of course a large cast often seems an advantage. As a result
Mother Courage
is still somehow lurking in the wings as an enormous challenge, even something of a reproach to our finest directors and actors. Why have they never been able to communicate its pessimism, its savagery and its force? A large part of the reason surely lies in the language, which in the original is unique, the invention of a major poet who chose neither to imitate seventeenth-century dialogue nor to reproduce modern everyday speech but devised his own curt, sardonic lingo, full of elisions and with few conjunctions, vividly conveying not only Courage’s own character but also the hard pressures of the war. This is established in the very first speeches, and from then on it becomes the principal dynamic force of what is otherwise a stragglingly episodic play. Those directors who have enough German to appreciate it have generally treated it as untranslatable, thereby losing their main chance of holding the audience’s attention; the sense has been communicated at the cost of Brecht’s imaginative assault on the ear. Our translation therefore sets out to tackle this key problem by using a somewhat analogous artificial diction, based this time on those north English cadences which can reflect a similarly dry, gloomily humorous approach to great events. It could have been done in other ways – by a Welsh or Irish writer perhaps, or one versed in Lallans – but so far it has not. The aim must be to find a language which will keep the play moving acrosstwelve years of history, a great slice of devastated Europe and, last but not least, three or four hours in the theatre.
Add this to the barriers sometimes presented by the ‘Model’, plus the widespread feeling among actors that performing Brecht demands outlandish technical methods, and there is some danger of
Mother Courage
appearing a horribly complicated play. You only have to read it to see that it is not. Even the changes which Brecht made to it are only designed to clarify and bring out more strongly what was already meant to be there; they were correctives, not major switches of direction. All this belongs in the background, to be digested and understood certainly, but not to obstruct the story of the play and the long chain of small, conflicting episodes which goes to make it up. The stage must be cleared, as Brecht cleared it in 1950 to tell German children ‘The story of Mother Courage’:
There once was a mother
Mother Courage they called her
In the Thirty Years War
She sold victuals to soldiers.
The war did not scare her
From making her cut
Her three children went with her
And so got their bit.
Her first son died a hero
The second an honest lad
A bullet found her daughter
Whose heart was too good.
In the end it has to be as simple as that.
Chronology
1898
10 February: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht born in Augsburg.
1917
Autumn: Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Brecht to Munich university.
1918
Work on his first play,
Baal
. In Augsburg Brecht is called up as medical orderly till end of year. Elected to Soldiers’ Council as Independent Socialist (USPD) following Armistice.
1919
Brecht writing second play,
Drums in the Night
. In January Spartacist Rising in Berlin. Rosa Luxemburg murdered. April—May: Bavarian Soviet. Summer: Weimar Republic constituted. Birth of Brecht’s illegitimate son Frank Banholzer.
1920
May: death of Brecht’s mother in Augsburg.
1921
Brecht leaves university without a degree. Reads Rimbaud.
1922
A turning
Mother Courage
is still somehow lurking in the wings as an enormous challenge, even something of a reproach to our finest directors and actors. Why have they never been able to communicate its pessimism, its savagery and its force? A large part of the reason surely lies in the language, which in the original is unique, the invention of a major poet who chose neither to imitate seventeenth-century dialogue nor to reproduce modern everyday speech but devised his own curt, sardonic lingo, full of elisions and with few conjunctions, vividly conveying not only Courage’s own character but also the hard pressures of the war. This is established in the very first speeches, and from then on it becomes the principal dynamic force of what is otherwise a stragglingly episodic play. Those directors who have enough German to appreciate it have generally treated it as untranslatable, thereby losing their main chance of holding the audience’s attention; the sense has been communicated at the cost of Brecht’s imaginative assault on the ear. Our translation therefore sets out to tackle this key problem by using a somewhat analogous artificial diction, based this time on those north English cadences which can reflect a similarly dry, gloomily humorous approach to great events. It could have been done in other ways – by a Welsh or Irish writer perhaps, or one versed in Lallans – but so far it has not. The aim must be to find a language which will keep the play moving acrosstwelve years of history, a great slice of devastated Europe and, last but not least, three or four hours in the theatre.
Add this to the barriers sometimes presented by the ‘Model’, plus the widespread feeling among actors that performing Brecht demands outlandish technical methods, and there is some danger of
Mother Courage
appearing a horribly complicated play. You only have to read it to see that it is not. Even the changes which Brecht made to it are only designed to clarify and bring out more strongly what was already meant to be there; they were correctives, not major switches of direction. All this belongs in the background, to be digested and understood certainly, but not to obstruct the story of the play and the long chain of small, conflicting episodes which goes to make it up. The stage must be cleared, as Brecht cleared it in 1950 to tell German children ‘The story of Mother Courage’:
There once was a mother
Mother Courage they called her
In the Thirty Years War
She sold victuals to soldiers.
The war did not scare her
From making her cut
Her three children went with her
And so got their bit.
Her first son died a hero
The second an honest lad
A bullet found her daughter
Whose heart was too good.
In the end it has to be as simple as that.
Chronology
1898
10 February: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht born in Augsburg.
1917
Autumn: Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Brecht to Munich university.
1918
Work on his first play,
Baal
. In Augsburg Brecht is called up as medical orderly till end of year. Elected to Soldiers’ Council as Independent Socialist (USPD) following Armistice.
1919
Brecht writing second play,
Drums in the Night
. In January Spartacist Rising in Berlin. Rosa Luxemburg murdered. April—May: Bavarian Soviet. Summer: Weimar Republic constituted. Birth of Brecht’s illegitimate son Frank Banholzer.
1920
May: death of Brecht’s mother in Augsburg.
1921
Brecht leaves university without a degree. Reads Rimbaud.
1922
A turning
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