Word: brecht
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Mother Courage, by Bertolt Brecht, is a firestorm of a play, raging over the subjects of war, history, ideology, heroism, vice and virtue. Brecht robs his 17th century heroine of her three children without breaking her fierce will to survive. In the daunting title role, Anne Bancroft unfortunately is not quite the earth mother she strives...
Mother Courage, by Bertolt Brecht, is an ironic firestorm of a play, raging over the subjects of war, history, ideology, heroism, vice and virtue. Brecht robs his 17th century peasant heroine of her three children without breaking her indomitable will to survive. In the daunting title role, Anne Bancroft is not quite the protean earth mother she strives...
Among the current crop of young actresses who have served at least a part of their apprenticeship on TV: Zohra Lampert, currently appearing with Anne Bancroft (another TV graduate) in Brecht's Mother Courage; Salome Jens, notable as well for her off-Broadway role in The Balcony and on-Broadway part in A Far Country; Collin Wilcox, who made a mark in TV's The Member of the Wedding, won excellent notices (along with Zohra Lampert) in Broadway's Look: We've Come Through. Of them all, none works more consistently, nor more consistently well, than...
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...
...play without fully measuring up to it. Anne Bancroft is more often the folksy Bronx matriarch than the flinty earth mother. Straining for Brechtian detachment, Director Jerome Robbins achieves a kind of laconic toughness in which the actors hold back, rather than banish, their tears. This misses Brecht's sense of the dire human predicament too deep for tears. Brecht tended to use sex for comic relief, but Barbara Harris' sly burlesque of a prostitute is the wrong kind of funny for this play. Eric Bentley's translation is fluently colloquial if occasionally a shade too matter...