Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht - Book Report/Review Example

BRECHT: THE PLEASURES OF DISTANCE I The fact that Mother Courage and Her Children written by Bertolt Brecht (1898 - 1956) was set in Sweden, Poland and Germany and its events happened during the period 1624 to 1636 is endorsement enough of its unconventional character. The three unities of time, place and action, considered to be the touchstone of success of a good drama, is given the go-by Brecht in a daring move to shift the scenes of the play across nations and spanning a decade. However, this departure has not in any way dampened the enthusiasm of the audience all over the world to appreciate Brechtian content. The malleability of its historical specificity and transportability to the ethos of other cultures is often cited as the fulcrum of its popularity. How does Brecht achieve this mastery It is through making good use of what in literary parlance is called open ended or episodic form of playwriting. Brecht himself declared in his essay The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre that his plays were based on a 'radical separation of the elements of production rather than the unity of action seen in Realism.' He believed that 'realism' was an illusion and seduced the audience to accept subconsciously its representation. Brecht always wanted the audience not to be carried away by the proceedings on stage but to continuously engage itself in 'distancing' so as not to lose the faculty of disinterested perception. In fact, his theatre always showed dramatic illusion in its characterization, setting, action and techniques. The use of screens featuring captions to reveal the forthcoming actions is a typical alienation device. Other devices to shock the audience included changing the scenery in front of the audience, projections, treadmills, hoists and musicians on the stage. The intention of Brecht's theatre practice is thus essentially didactic. Mother courage tells the story of the owner of a travelling canteen wagon. She makes her living from the troops. Although she loses two sons to the Protestan army and one to the Catholic, her resolve remains unabated. She has a matter-of-fact philosophy of ife and does not view war from the aesthetic side of it but from a pragmatic one. When the play ends, a tired Mother Courage is left with a dilapidated wagon but with a heart that still ticks with verve. II The enduring success of the plays of Brecht is attributed to the open-ended nature of his plays. His plays do not get closeted within conventions nor do they lend themselves to straight reading. They are capable of extension because a Brechtian play does not climax from a progressive heightening of tension provided by the interwoven incidents. In Mother Courage, the techniques of alienation contribute substantially to endorse its episodic form. The protagonist's last statement that "I must get back into business" is itself an indication that there is a renewal of faith and a re-enactment of proceedings. Even the 'business' called war will go on, Brecht seems to say. Thus the theme of war also becomes the play's open-ended nature. Written during Brecht's exile in Sweden in 1939, Mother Courage (naturally) is a defiant act of playwriting. Its episodic form (as opposed to the well-wrought Aristotelian play), the unique narrator (in the form of a poster announcing things to come), the capitalization of war, the setting - significant features of the dramatic structure of the play - have contributed substantially to its popularity. The setting of the play (The Thirty Years War, Spring 1624 to January 1636 and happening in Germany, Poland, Bavaria and Saxony) is more of a movie canvas than of a mere play. In fact, Mother Courage is an example of how a creative genius like Brecht unfetters himself in the face of distress. The exile thus becomes an opportunity to delve into the nature of time and spirit. When 'time is in prison' and the 'spirit is soaring', the conventions of either form or genre do not constrain creation. Perhaps, it is this iconoclastic nature of the play that has made it an all-time favourite. In an essay by Franz Norbert Mennemeir in the book Brecht: A Collection of Critical Essays, he observes: Brecht approached his actual object in roundabout ways only. His epic theatre, whose declared goal it is to provide today's "scientific age" with a theatrical pleasure suitable to it is a theater of parables and similes, of masques and fairy tales. Almost always the action takes place in far-away settings, in India, China, Japan, exotic lands out of which all temporal references have been carefully removed. Even a distinctly modern city like Chicago appears in Brecht as a poetic medium furnished with the sensational features of the imaginary "roaring Twenties." III Alienation (verfremdungseffekt) or distanciation blended with the play's open-ended nature is what makes it on of the most popular plays in the history of theatre. Brecht remarks that by observing others and by wrestling with oneself, one produces a better understanding of literature. He called for alienation to oppose the mystifying yet realistic tendencies of the conventional stage that only served to lull the audience into a trance. Brecht did not spare any means to heighten the participation of the audience in the stage proceedings - lights, props, banners, gestures were only a few of the distancing techniques. In fact, this alienation also created a dissociation of unity that demanded a sensibility from the audience more focused than the mediocre. Thus Brecht's plays were not for the thoughtless, but for the thoughtful able enough to pick up the threads in an act of involved, intelligent play-reading. Mother Courage demands our critical reflections. When Mother Courage utters the outrageous "I wont let you spoil my war for me. Destroys the weak, does it Well, what does peace do for'em, huh War feeds its people better" statement, Brecht is also foreseeing a war that is not just a destroyer but also a notorious preserver. Brecht believed that quite often men were 'empty pages on which revolution wrote its instructions' (The Measures Taken). His believed that the tradition of the Aristotelian theory of drama argued against its dynamic nature. The Marxist theory, on the other hand, believed in the Enlightenment philosophy of the progress of man. Brecht wanted to convey this dynamism through the plays that he wrote. The technique of alienation and the opposition to the classical unities of time, place and action were the theatrical devices by which Brecht drove home his ideology. He, in fact, weaves into the play contradictions disguised as assertions. When Mother Courage advocates war and talks a dozen about 'war as business', audiences may mutter in protest, but the fact of the matter is that Mother Courage is intended to be a complex figure and the playwright rightly resisted the straight portrayal of the notions of maternity, the milk of human kindness and all that stuff. Although the eagerness of Mother Courage to "turn a penny" in the midst of dissolution offends the sensitive observer, although the religious war unleashed by the "big boys" is exposed in its commercial reality with aggressive ardor, still one experiences the action as a representation of the inhuman, unfeeling state of this world, against which there is no rebellion for the individual. Of course, one may, along with Brecht, nourish the hope that some miraculous day war and destruction may be counted as "history," as a result of a pacifist transformation of the human race (140). The postmodern techniques of war and the Orwellian notions of it may prove Brecht wrong as an Enlightenment playwright. However, Brecht's amazing insight into history comes when Mother Courage, at the occasion of the burial of General Tilly, hears the army chaplain's description of the moment as "historic." Mother Courage remarks that for her the moment is historic for other reasons:" It is historic to me, all right, because they punched my daughter in the eye." It is this sense of the personal at the cost of the universal that makes Brecht truly humanistic. The enjoyment of his plays have their origin in enabling its audience forget boundaries of custom and convention. The open-ended, episodic form of the Brechtian play was in more ways than one a reflection of the playwright's cosmopolitan mindscape. Perhaps, one should not ignore the id-ego dichotomy as expressed through Mother Courage in the play - an aspect that must surely have enhanced its popularity. Mother Courage can exist only if she takes control of her maternal instincts for the sake of her living. Despite the bankruptcy and the destruction of her own existence looming large, she steels herself up for her own sake and her children through the business of war. Mother Courage is not a character of a morality play. It is, instead, a mocking of morality. Mother Courage will continue to be enjoyed by audiences all over the world for its unending tissues of (re)interpretation. Bibliography Dernetz, Peter (ed). A Collection of Critical Essays. New jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Willet, John. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects. London: Methuen&Co, 1959. Willet, John (tr). The Collected Plays of Bertolt Brecht. Vol.5. London: Methuen, 1995. Read More