Intellectual Firestorm

Mother Courage and Her Children, by

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 power of a major tragedy.

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.

Eilif is "The Brave Son." He makes a name for himself in the war by staging a guerrilla raid on some farmers, murdering them, and stealing their cattle. During a brief interval of peace, he does the same thing and is shot for brigandage. Swiss Cheese is "The Honest Son," faithfully concealing a military payroll box after the enemy overruns his outfit. While Mother Courage haggles over the bribe price for his pardon, he is shot. At this blow, Mother Courage gives a fist-stifled yowl of animal grief and the playgoer grudgingly begins to pity her fate.

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`a.

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.

This first Broadway production suggests the stature of the 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-of-fact for a playwright who was always a poet. Despite these shortcomings, playgoers jaded on dramatic cream puffs ought to seize the chance to swallow intellectual fire.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.