Mother Courage and Her Children Bertolt Brecht five

Mother Courage and Her Children Bertolt Brecht

“…five black actors play the roles they said they were used to getting — drug addict, criminal — with a kind of Brechtian awkwardness. ” Parul Sehgal, “Young Jean Lee’s Unsafe Spaces, ” The New York Times, July 18, 2018.

“But then, in one of the movie’s many Brechtian asides, Deadpool helpfully explains that ‘we need ’em tough, morally flexible, and young enough to carry their own franchise for 10 to 12 years. ’” “Deadpool 2: Fourth Wall Screwball, ” The Weekly Standard, May 25, 2018.

“Parliament would in effect be seeking, in a Brechtian fashion, to dissolve ‘the people’ and put another in place that will vote differently in a second referendum. ” Chris Bickerton, “Arrogant Remainers Want a Second Vote. That Would Be a Bad Day for Democracy, ” The Guardian, January 16, 2019.

“The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too – Just like me – It’s only natural – It’ll never change – The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable – That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world – I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it – That’s not the way – That’s extraordinary, hardly believable – It’s got to stop – The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary – That’s great art: nothing obvious in it – I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh. ” Brecht, quoted in Stephen Unwin and Julian Jones, The Complete Brecht Toolkit (London: Nick Hern Books, 2014), 57.

Spring 1624. The Protestant King of Sweden invades Catholic Poland. Recruiters for the Swedish General Oxenstjerna search in Dalarna for soldiers. The merchant, Anna Fierling, who goes by the name Mother Courage, loses a son. (Scene 1)

“The ‘alienation effect’ doesn’t need a particularly strange kind of acting: it just needs attention to the details of the play and a refusal to overwhelm the audience with demands for individual empathy. ” Brecht, quoted in Unwin and Jones, 53.

“The attitude of chasing away a fly is not yet a social gest, though the attitude of chasing away a dog may be one, for instance if it comes to represent a badly dressed man’s continual battle against watchdogs. ” Brecht, quoted in Unwin and Jones, 63.

“Tilly’s victory at Magdeburg costs Mother Courage four officers’ shirts. ” (Scene 5)

“As [the soldiers] fuss and argue over what to do in the face of a woman they cannot intimidate, the source of their soldierly authority -- in effect, of the masculine authority of war -- becomes rather painfully clear: it is Kattrin, the abject mute on the roof with a small drum, on whom their identities as fighting men (and the authority of the regimes they uphold) ultimately depend. ” Kim Solga, “Mother Courage and Its Abject: Reading the Violence of Identification, ” Modern Drama 46, no. 3 (2003): 351.