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

by Bertolt Brecht

  Kattrin and the bargaining over Swiss Cheese

  The portrayal of dumb Kattrin is not realistic if her goodness is stressed to the point of making her oppose her mother’s attempt to get the amount of the bribe reduced. She runs off from scouring the knives when she begins to see that the bargaining has been going on too long. When after the execution Yvette sends her ahead and she goes to her mother with her face averted, there may be a reproach in this – but above all she cannot look her in the face.

  The denial

  Courage is sitting, holding the hand of her daughter who is standing. When the soldiers come in with the dead boy and she is asked to look at him, she stands up, goes over, looks at him, shakes her head, goes back and sits down. During all this she has an obstinate expression, her lower lip thrust forward. Here Weigel’s recklessness in throwing away her role reached its highest point.

  (The actor playing the sergeant can command the spectator’s astonishment by looking around at his men in astonishment at such hardness.)

  Observation

  Her look of extreme suffering after she has heard the shots, her unscreaming open mouth and backward-bent head probably derived from a press photograph of an Indian woman crouched over the body of her dead son during the shelling of Singapore. Weigel must have seen it years before, though when questioned she did not remember it. That is how observations are stored up by actors. – Actually it was only in the later performances that Weigel assumed this attitude.

  […]

  4

  The Song of the Grand Capitulation

  Mother Courage is sitting outside the captain’s tent; she has come to put in a complaint about damage to her cart; a clerk advises her in vain to let well alone. A young soldier appears, also to make a complaint; she dissuades him. The bitter ‘Song of the Grand Capitulation’. Courage herself learns from the lesson she has given the young soldier and leaves without having put in her complaint.

  Overall arrangement

  Mother Courage is sitting outside the captain’s tent; she has come to put in a complaint about damage to her cart; a clerk advises her in vain to let well alone. The clerk comes up to the bench where Courage is sitting and speaks to her kindly. She remains obstinate.

  A young soldier appears, also to make a complaint; she dissuades him, arguing that his anger is too short. Two soldiers enter. The younger wants to rush into the captain’s tent and the older is holding him back by main force. Courage intervenes and involves the young man in a conversation about the danger of short attacks of anger.

  The bitter ‘Song of the Grand Capitulation’. The young soldier, whose anger has evaporated, goes off cursing.

  Courage herself learns from the lesson she has given the young soldier, and leaves without putting in her complaint.

  Courage’s state of mind at the beginning of the scene

  In the first rehearsals Weigel opened this scene in an attitude of dejection. This was not right.

  Courage learns by teaching. She teaches capitulation and learns it. The scene calls for bitterness at the start and dejection at the end.

  Courage’s depravity

  In no other scene is Courage so depraved as in this one, where she instructs the young man in capitulation to the higher-ups and then puts her own teaching into effect. Nevertheless Weigel’s face in this scene shows a glimmer of wisdom and even of nobility, and that is good. Because the depravity is not so much that of her person as that of her class, and because she herself at least rises above it somewhat by showing that she understands this weakness and that it even makes her angry.

  […]

  The scene played without alienation

  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.

  Overall arrangement

  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 new Courage

  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.

  A detail

  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.

  A detail

  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 contradictions must not disappear

  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 scene is dependent on mime

  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.

  Kattrin

  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?

  A detail

  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 and pauses

  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.

  Overall arrangements

  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.

  Inventory

  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.

  Funeral oration for Tilly

  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.)

  A detail

  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.

  Mime

  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.

  A detail

  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.

  A point to consider

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

  […]

  Kattrin

  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.

  Contradiction

  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.

  Ove
rall arrangement

  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.

  Signs of prosperity

  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.

  In this short scene Weigel showed Courage in the full possession of her vitality, as previously only in scene 5 (the battlefield scene); in scene 5, however, she was gloomy; here she was cheerful.

  […]

  8

  Peace threatens to ruin Mother Courage’s business. Her dashing son performs one heroic deed too many and comes to a sticky end