Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Germany's late Bertolt Brecht, is a play of bottomless ironies and paradoxes. It is a stubbornly antiheroic play with a mulishly magnificent heroine. It is an antiwar play that assumes war will never end. Coming from a Communist, it is an anti-bourgeois play, but it negates all ideologies by farcically reducing them to futility. It is a play ostensibly demonstrating the relentless sweep of history, but actually revealing the tenacious, indomitable life force in human beings that survives history. Finally, Mother Courage is a black, corrosive comedy that almost alone among 20th century plays approaches the purgative...
Writing in 1939, Brecht set his drama against the backdrop of the 17th century Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics. In her cagey peasant way, Mother Courage (Anne Bancroft) is a petty war profiteer peddling brandy, belts and other boodle to the troops. Her only religion is her hand-drawn canteen cart and her three children. But just as Mother Courage is a coward, her children ironically symbolize the degradation and defeat of virtue in the world...
Daughter Kattrin is a war-victimized mute with a desperate love of children. In Brecht's mordant view, kindness is voiceless in the world. Kattrin performs the only noble and impassioned act in the play when she mounts a platform and beats out a drum tattoo warning a sleeping town of ambush. A single musket shot silences her. Zohra Lampert detonates this episode shatteringly after having made her Kattrin an intaglio of forlorn brooding poignance. As Anne Bancroft cradles her daughter in marble stillness, the scene has the desolating sadness of a Piet...
Alone, Mother Courage harnesses herself to the canteen cart and arduously, tortuously circles the stage. Brecht would say that she is determined to keep "getting her cut," come what may, but audiences are perversely affected by the scene and their blurred gaze tells them that Brecht wrote into it some quintessential gritty gallantry...
...Charles produces mostly twentieth century works by authors such as Brecht, Shaw, and O'Neill. A production of Othello is planned for this spring...