Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (50 page)

[…]

Such a scene is socially disastrous if by hypnotic action the actress playing Mother Courage invites the audience to identify with her. This will only increase the spectator’s own tendencies to resignation and capitulation – besides giving him the pleasure of being superior to himself. It will not put him in a position to feel the beauty and attraction of a social problem.

5

Mother Courage loses four officers’ shirts and dumb Kattrin finds a baby

After a battle. Courage refuses to give the chaplain her officers’ shirts to bandage wounded peasants. Kattrin threatens her mother. At the risk of her life Kattrin saves an infant. Courage laments the loss of her
shirts and snatches a stolen coat away from a soldier who has stolen some schnapps, while Kattrin rocks the baby in her arms
.

After a battle
. Courage is standing with two soldiers outside her cart; its sideboard is lowered for use as a bar. Kattrin, sitting on the steps, is uneasy. Courage gulps down two glasses of schnapps; she needs them to harden her to the sight of misery.

Courage refuses to give the chaplain her officers’ shirts to bandage wounded peasants
. From inside a peasant’s wrecked house the chaplain shouts for linen. Kattrin is prevented by her mother from taking officers’ shirts from the cart. Courage obstinately blocks the steps, letting no one in.

Kattrin threatens her mother
. With the help of one soldier the chaplain has carried a wounded woman out of the house, then an old peasant whose arm is dangling. Again he calls for linen and all look at Courage who lapses into silence. Angrily Kattrin seizes a plank and threatens her mother. The chaplain has to take it away from her. He picks Courage up, sets her down on a chest, and takes some officers’ shirts.

At the risk of her life Kattrin saves an infant
. Still stuggling with the chaplain, Courage sees her daughter rush into the house that is threatening to cave in, to save a baby. Tugged both ways, between Kattrin and the officers’ shirts, she runs about until the shirts are torn into bandages and Kattrin comes out of the house with the infant. Now she runs after Kattrin to make her get rid of the baby. (Movements: Kattrin with the baby runs counter-clockwise around the wounded, then clockwise around the cart.) Her mother stops in the middle of the stage because the chaplain is coming out of the cart with the shirts. Kattrin sits down on the chest right.

Courage laments the loss of her shirts and snatches a stolen coat away from a soldier who has stolen some schnapps, while Kattrin rocks the baby in her arms
. After springing like a tigress at the soldier who has failed to pay, Mother Courage stuffs his fur coat into the cart.

A change has taken place in Courage. She has sacrificed her son to the cart and now she defends the cart like a tigress. She has been hardened by the hard bargains she drives.

At the beginning of the scene (after ‘They give us victory marches all right, but catch them giving men their pay’) Weigel’s Courage tossed off two glasses of schnapps. Apart from this extenuating circumstance, she provided no justification for Courage’s haggling, scolding and raging throughout the scene.

There was a kind of by-play between the soldier who gets no schnapps from Courage and the soldier drinking schnapps at the bar. It expressed the hostility between the haves and the have-nots. The drinker grins scornfully and drains his glass with ostentatious enjoyment, the have-not gives him a long hostile stare before turning around in disgust and going defeated to the rear – to wait for a chance to lay hands on the schnapps. Later the drinker will show more sympathy than the thirsty man for the wounded peasant woman.

The character of the chaplain is based on a contradiction. He is part scoundrel, part superior intelligence. The actor [Werner] Hinz gave him a wooden, awkward, comical quality, which he retained in his role of good Samaritan. His manner was stiff and cold, as though it were only his clergyman’s past that impelled him to turn against his present employer. But something else shone through: his former high position gives him the leadership on the battlefield where he acts in a spirit deriving from the realisation that in the last analysis he himself is one of the oppressed. When he helps the injured, it becomes clear that he too is to be pitied.

The effect of the battlefield scene depends entirely on the scrupulously detailed mime with which Kattrin shows her mounting anger at her mother’s inhumanity. Angelika Hurwicz ran back and forth like an alarmed hen between the wounded peasants and Mother Courage. Up to the point when she began to argue, in gestures, with her mother, she made no attempt to repress the voluptuous curiosity that horror
inspires in infantile persons. She carried the baby out of the house like a thief; at the end of the scene she lifted the baby up in the air, prodding it with both hands as though to make it laugh. If her mother’s share in the spoils is the fur coat, hers is the baby.

In the battlefield scene Kattrin threatens to kill her mother because she refuses the wounded peasants the linen. It is necessary to show an intelligent Kattrin from the start. (Her infirmity misleads actors into representing her as dull.) At the beginning she is fresh, gay and even-tempered – Hurwicz gave her a kind of awkward charm even in the conversation with her brother in scene 3. True, the helplessness of her tongue communicates itself to her body; but it is the war that breaks her, not her infirmity; in technical terms, the war must find something that remains to be broken.

The whole point is missed if her love of children is depreciated as mindless animal instinct. Her saving of the city of Halle is an intelligent act. How else would it be possible to bring out what must be brought out, namely, that here the most helpless creature of all is ready to help?

At the end of the scene Kattrin lifted the baby into the air, while Courage rolled up the fur coat and threw it into the cart: both women had their share of the spoils.

Music played an essential part in the fifth (battlefield) scene.

Victory march: from the start to ‘Somebody give me a hand’.

From after ‘My arm’s gone’ to ‘I can’t give nowt’.

From after ‘… happy as a queen in all this misery’ to the end of the scene.

Pauses after:

‘Town must of paid him something.’

‘Where’s that linen?’

‘Blood’s coming through.’ [This line spoken by the chaplain is deleted from the final text. It followed ‘All your victories mean to me is losses’.]

6

Prosperity has set in, but Kattrin is disfigured

Mother Courage, grown prosperous, is stocktaking; funeral oration for the fallen field marshal Tilly. Conversation about the duration of the war; the chaplain proves that the war is going to go on for a long time. Kattrin is sent to buy merchandise. Mother Courage declines a proposal of marriage and insists on firewood. Kattrin is permanently disfigured by some soldiers and rejects Yvette’s red shoes. Mother Courage curses the war
.

Mother Courage, grown prosperous, is stocktaking; funeral oration for the fallen field marshal Tilly
. Courage interrupts her counting of merchandise to serve brandy to some soldiers who are playing hooky from the funeral. She virtuously reproves them, declaring that she feels sorry for generals because the common people don’t give their grandiose plans proper support. Meanwhile she is looking for worms in a tin box. The regimental clerk listens in vain, hoping to catch her in a subversive utterance.

Conversation about the duration of the war; the chaplain proves that the war will go on for a long time
. The right section of the stage is the private quarters. To the left are the bar and the guest table at which the clerk and the chaplain are sitting. There is by-play between right and left when the drinking soldier sings for Kattrin and she smiles at him, while Courage, with a bundle of belt buckles which she is counting, comes over to the table to ask the chaplain-potboy how long he thinks the war will go on. All through his cynical comments she stands deep in thought. Should she lay in new supplies?

Kattrin is sent to buy merchandise
. When the chaplain-potboy says the war will go on for a long time, Kattrin runs angrily behind the cart.
Courage laughs, brings her back and sends her to the camp with a big basket to buy merchandise. ‘Don’t let them take nowt, think of your dowry.’

Mother Courage declines a proposal of marriage and insists on firewood
. Courage has sat down on a stool beside her cart; she fills a pipe and tells the potboy to chop some firewood. He chops clumsily, complaining that his talents are lying fallow, and, probably with a view to avoiding physical labour, asks her to marry him. She hints that she doesn’t want to take anybody into her business, and leads him gently back to the chopping block.

Kattrin is permanently disfigured by some soldiers and rejects Yvette’s red shoes
. Kattrin staggers in with a basket full of merchandise. She collapses at the entrance to the tent and Courage has to drag her over to her stool and dress her wound. Kattrin rejects the red shoes that her mother brings out to comfort her; they are now useless. With silent reproach she crawls into the cart.

Mother Courage curses the war
. Slowly Courage brings forward the new supplies, which Kattrin has defended at such cost, and gets down on her knees to look them over in the place where she was stocktaking at the beginning of the scene. She recognises that war is a miserable source of income and for the first and last time curses the war.

Again Courage has changed. Increasing prosperity has made her softer and more human. Both qualities attract the chaplain and he proposes to her. For the first time we see her sitting briefly at rest, not working.

In the course of many performances it was found that Courage’s funeral oration for the field marshal is more effective if during the pause, when all are looking to the rear and the funeral march has grown loud and solemn, the clerk, who is slightly tipsy, rises from his chair and watches Courage closely, suspecting that in this oration she is ridiculing the field marshal. He sits down again in disappointment, because Courage has not said anything demonstrably incriminating.

(The pause during the funeral march must be long; otherwise the funeral scene will not produce the right effect.)

In the funeral oration for field marshal Tilly (’Can’t help feeling sorry for those generals and emperors’) Weigel added – after ‘how’s he to know any better?’ – ‘Jesus Christ, the worms have got into my biscuits.’ While saying this she laughed. Here Mother Courage releases the merriment which, with the clerk looking on, she was unable to express in her evasively subversive speech.

The chaplain’s remarks on the longevity of the war must not take on an independent existence. They are the answer to Courage’s anxious question as to whether she can risk taking in new merchandise. While the chaplain was talking, Weigel mimed Courage’s anxiety and calculations.

The drunken soldier addresses his song to Kattrin. She smiles at him. For the last time before she is disfigured the spectator is reminded that she is capable of love.

Violent occupations lead actors to shout. The actor playing the chaplain shouted occasionally while chopping wood. The scene suffered.

[…]

Again sitting huddled on the chest as during the drunken soldier’s song, the injured girl merely touches her forehead gingerly once or twice to make sure where the wound is; otherwise, except for the willingness with which she lets herself be bandaged, she gives no indication of knowing what the scar will mean to her. Protest is expressed by her lack of interest in Yvette’s red shoes and by the way she crawls into the cart: she blames her mother for what has happened to her.

Courage has cursed the war while gathering up the supplies in defence of which her daughter has been disfigured.

Resuming the stocktaking begun at the start of the scene, she now counts the new articles.

7

Mother Courage at the peak of her business career

Mother Courage has corrected her opinion of the war and sings its praises as a good provider
.

Mother Courage has corrected her opinion of the war and sings its praises as a good provider
. Pulled by Kattrin and the chaplain-potboy, the cart comes in from the rear and rolls along the footlights. Courage walks beside them, arguing with them; then, while singing, she turns to the audience. Pause.

After some forty performances it seemed to us that in scene 6, for the stocktaking, Courage should have rings on her fingers and a chain of silver talers round her neck as a sign of the relative prosperity she had achieved. But after a few more performances one of us discovered that this weakened her speech about the courage of the poor, and we decided to put the signs of prosperity in scene 7. Here, where she retracts her condemnation of war, her recently acquired signs of prosperity show her up for what she is: bribed.