Word: brecht
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...Brecht, Mother Courage was a shameless war profiteer. He was disgusted when audiences invariably wept at play's end as Mother Courage yoked herself once more to her wagon, a mute indomitable symbol of humanity's will to endure...
...Joan of the Stockyards (1929) is wholly in the first category. Pierpont Mauler is a crush-as-crush-can Chicago meat baron. When a careless worker falls into the meat machinery at Mauler's plant, he is tinned with the product. This sort of thing makes Brecht's caricature of capitalists both hopelessly dated and immensely funny to a modern American audience. Joan Dark (Jeanne d'Arc), the girl who stands up to Mauler, is a parody figure mostly modeled on Shaw's Major Barbara-a Salvation Army-type lassie who belongs to an evangelical group...
Greed v. Mother Love. In Mother Courage (1939), one of his most popular plays and possibly his best, Brecht exhibits the raffish-human strain, and doctrine is relatively in abeyance. Mother Courage is an earthy female Falstaff with Falstaff's coarsely skeptical views of war, honor and courage. However, the Thirty Years' War is on, and since the profit motive is no laughing matter, Mother Courage cashes in on the troops. Trundling her wagon, a kind of mobile 17th century PX, behind the shifting battlefronts, she sells shoes, shirts and booze to the soldiers...
Ironic Significance. Part of the current vogue for Bertolt Brecht is that the whole world has bad dreams. His treatment of the great themes is not always secure. Love he customarily handles as parody, death as an animal calamity, and time as a metronome of disaster. He brings full authority perhaps only to man's inhumanity to man and to the theme of money, one of the great neglected subjects of modern fiction and drama. A hysteria of violence hovers constantly at the outskirts of his work. Today that seems timely; in time it may seem merely tedious...
...Brecht succeeded by failing. He wanted to hone his audiences to critical keenness, and he only managed to move them to tears and laughter. He wanted to make his theater a crucible of social change, and he merely convinced theatergoers of the tenacious durability of man's unchanging nature. If he had succeeded, as Biographer Martin Esslin points out, he would have been merely "a flat and boring party hack." Failing, he became a great moral puzzle, a seething controversy, and one of the most significant writers...