Mother Courage and Her Children

The chronicle form invites the subtractive test, since the scenes are episodes rather than links in a causal chain, and most of them pass it. Each child is taken by a scene of its own, Eilif in the second and eighth, Swiss Cheese in the third, Kattrin in the sixth and eleventh, and each death is foretold in the first, when Courage lets the slips with the black cross fall to every one of her own children. The fourth scene, where she teaches a young soldier to swallow his anger and then withdraws her own complaint, is the play’s theory acted out. What could go: the tenth scene, a song heard from a farmhouse, a mood more than a step; the Chaplain’s longer turns, which say twice what the action shows; and the Cook’s offer, which runs long before it arrives. These hold it lowest of the eleven gated and floored axes.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: war is commerce carried on by other means, and those who live by it as small traders are consumed by it while believing they are its beneficiaries. The harder finding is carried by the children, each of whom dies of a virtue: Eilif of bravery, rewarded in the war and shot for the same act in the brief peace; Swiss Cheese of honesty, who will not give up the regimental cash box; Kattrin of pity, who drums to wake Halle. In a world at war the virtues are lethal, and the vices that keep Courage alive keep her trading. Most bitter, suffering teaches nothing: “Der Krieg soll verflucht sein”
(cursed be the war), she says at the end of the sixth scene, and in the next she is at the height of her business, singing. Held a step off the top because the songs state part of what the play should show, and its economics are drawn in a broader line than its psychology.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The play is built to refuse elevation, the captions draining suspense and the songs breaking feeling, and it rises anyway, which is to its credit and part of its argument. The ceiling: Kattrin on the roof in the eleventh scene, drumming while the soldiers threaten the farmer’s family and then shoot, the town waking to her drum as she dies; and the third scene, where Courage haggles a few guilders too long, hears the volley that kills her son, and must not recognise his body. The dreadful returns at the close, when she pays the peasants to bury her daughter and harnesses herself to the wagon. The cold heights belong to the Song of the Great Capitulation. Held below the top because elevation is rationed by design, and the long stretch from the seventh scene to the ninth moves by irony, not height.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth built, against itself. The play takes the oldest figure of the stage, the mother who loses her children, Hecuba, Niobe, the mater dolorosa, and builds the archetype out of trade: the sorrowing mother is also the merchant whose bargaining kills her son. The wagon is the play’s one constant object, home, shop and yoke, and the last image puts her between its shafts like a beast. The lot-drawing of the first scene is fate made into a sideshow trick by the woman who will be its instrument. Kattrin is the mute prophet whose only speech is a drum, a Cassandra heard once who dies of it. The archetype stays particular: Courage is a woman with a stock of brandy and belt buckles and a grievance about a damaged wagon. Held a step off the top because the myth is held in tension with a lesson, and the Chaplain and the Cook remain types.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance is the dramatic tradition Brecht called Aristotelian: identification, suspense, catharsis, the history play of great men. The swerve is the epic theatre carried into a full-scale tragedy: a chronicle of a camp-follower, not of Gustavus Adolphus or Tilly, whose funeral happens offstage while Kattrin’s face is scarred; captions that give the ending away; songs that step outside the scene; a heroine meant to be watched rather than wept for. The stake was large. Written in exile for a stage that did not exist, without a German theatre, a public or a performance in view, it wagered that the method of the Lehrstücke and The Threepenny Opera could carry a major play. Held below the top because the theory and much of the technique had been made by Brecht and Piscator in the 1920s; this is the method’s fulfilment more than its first break.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes, and the play’s own history proves it. Played for identification, as Zurich received it, it becomes the tragedy of an indomitable mother, the reading Brecht revised his text against. The chronicle form knows that the war has no plot and no end. The captions know that what matters is not what happens but how and why, so that the audience watches the bargaining rather than waiting for the outcome. The songs know that a woman can sing a truth she does not live by, as in the Great Capitulation, or one that undercuts her, as in the Courage song on the road after the curse of the sixth scene. The repetition, child by child, is the argument that she will not learn. Held off the top because the form’s knowledge is partly enforced by the songs rather than embodied in the scenes.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: eight decades of production and argument have not settled the play. Whether Courage is a tragic figure or a negative example; whether Kattrin’s act is the play’s hope or a death as futile as her brothers’; whether the play’s power comes from its method or in spite of it. The Zurich and Berlin texts are a documented record of an author fighting his own play’s sympathies, and they keep returning criticism to the question of what the text compels. The form yields on return as well: the songs answer one another across the scenes, the Courage song returning on the road in the seventh scene after the curse of the sixth. Held a step down because the open questions cluster around one, sympathy against judgment, rather than ramifying.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is the German drama of the twentieth century and, through the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre of the world. The force: the play is the epic theatre’s demonstration that its method could carry a play of full tragic size, and it is the work by which that method is most often known. Held where it is because much of the reach belongs to Brecht’s method and company as a whole, of which this play is the flagship rather than the only carrier. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Berlin production of January 1949 founded the Berliner Ensemble; its guest performances in Paris and in London in 1956 changed the French stage, through Planchon and Barthes, and the British, through the generation of Edward Bond, John Arden and later Caryl Churchill; and the play has been made new by many hands, among them Tony Kushner’s version for Meryl Streep in New York in 2006.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Some eighty-five years since its writing, eighty-five since its first performance and seventy-seven since the Berlin text. The text survives whole and authorised, and its presence is continuous and wide: one of the most performed German plays of its century, in the repertoire of theatres across Europe and beyond, taught in schools and universities, and translated many times into English alone. It has outlived the conditions that made it, exile and the anti-fascist emergency of 1939, and is staged now for every war. Charged slightly, below the widest presence its span allows: its reception remains tied to its method and to a period of political theatre whose authority has faded, and in some countries it lives more in the classroom than on the stage.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Scored on Brecht’s German. The language is his finest stage idiom: laconic, gestic, built from Luther’s Bible, the south German vernacular and the soldier’s talk, so that each line carries an attitude as well as a sense. Courage’s speech, with its proverbs, its haggling arithmetic and its swerves from piety to profit, is one of the great stage voices of the language. The construction is exact: the opening, where the sale of a buckle covers the recruiting of a son, is the whole play in miniature, and the bargaining over Swiss Cheese in the third scene times the comedy of money to the minute of his death. The songs are verse of real command, the Great Capitulation above all. Charged a little for the Chaplain’s and the Cook’s longer exchanges, where the dialogue turns to exposition of the thesis.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Yvette’s comic song of fraternization and the haggling for a son’s life in the same scene; or the bargaining over a buckle in the first scene and Kattrin’s drumming in the eleventh. One law governs them: everything has a price in war, and whoever will not pay it in money pays in life. Courage’s comedy and her catastrophe obey that law, and so does Kattrin, the one person who acts without a calculation and who therefore dies. Yvette, who sells herself and rises to a colonel’s widow, is the law’s other face. The range is wide and held: farce with the Cook, ecclesiastical satire with the Chaplain, battlefield, peace scare, funeral, lullaby. Charged slightly where the method’s law and the play’s emotion pull apart, as on the roof, whose force exceeds the irony around it; but that tension is contained, not a contradiction.

Score: 9.1 / 10

For a single play, much is held in one structure. Consciousness: Courage’s divided mind, trader and mother at once, and Kattrin’s wordless one. The family: three children by three fathers, and the daughter kept back from marriage and from the Cook’s inn. Labour and trade: the wagon, the stock, prices that rise with the fighting and collapse in the peace. The state: two armies, generals offstage, recruiters and paymasters. History: twelve years of the war. The sacred: Catholic and Protestant flags changed like goods, a Chaplain who loses his calling, the peasants’ prayer in the eleventh scene. The natural order is barely present beyond the seasons. What holds it lowest of the twelve is the form, and the figure describes it: the war is shown entirely through one wagon.

Score: 8.4 / 10