PLAY/BOOK REVIEW
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN, BERTOLT BRECHT, GROVE PRESS, 1991
In what appears to be a permanent war in Iraq it is not untimely to address the question of how individuals caught up on the margins of warfare cope, for good or evil, with the trauma of it. Bertolt Brecht, the master Communist playwright, has taken a story of a working mother’s struggle to survive as a camp following petty merchant in the Thirty Years War of the 17th century in Germany as his backdrop to investigate one aspect of that phenomena- the elemental struggle for individual survival. And it is not pretty.
If the simple moral of the story is that war does nothing to elevate the human spirit or bring out the better instincts of our nature Brecht has made his point in rather stark terms. The struggle of Mother Courage to keep her ‘mom and pop’ business going at the cost of the lives of her children may not go down well with today’s more squeamish audiences but the unfortunate fact is that all over the world, and most notably in today’s Iraq, those very same kind of cold, calculating decisions are being made by families in order to survive. The fact that it is a mother, the source of life and supposed nurturer-in-chief, who is sacrificing her children only makes that observation more compelling.
Brecht, moreover, wants us to see that while greed and acquisitiveness may not be eternal human characteristics under conditions of scarcity that have dominated most of human history that struggle has led to some very strange behavior. In the end his play is not only against war but the economic conditions that engender war as well. That would require some mighty big changes. But we had better think about it. Pronto.
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN, BERTOLT BRECHT, GROVE PRESS, 1991
In what appears to be a permanent war in Iraq it is not untimely to address the question of how individuals caught up on the margins of warfare cope, for good or evil, with the trauma of it. Bertolt Brecht, the master Communist playwright, has taken a story of a working mother’s struggle to survive as a camp following petty merchant in the Thirty Years War of the 17th century in Germany as his backdrop to investigate one aspect of that phenomena- the elemental struggle for individual survival. And it is not pretty.
If the simple moral of the story is that war does nothing to elevate the human spirit or bring out the better instincts of our nature Brecht has made his point in rather stark terms. The struggle of Mother Courage to keep her ‘mom and pop’ business going at the cost of the lives of her children may not go down well with today’s more squeamish audiences but the unfortunate fact is that all over the world, and most notably in today’s Iraq, those very same kind of cold, calculating decisions are being made by families in order to survive. The fact that it is a mother, the source of life and supposed nurturer-in-chief, who is sacrificing her children only makes that observation more compelling.
Brecht, moreover, wants us to see that while greed and acquisitiveness may not be eternal human characteristics under conditions of scarcity that have dominated most of human history that struggle has led to some very strange behavior. In the end his play is not only against war but the economic conditions that engender war as well. That would require some mighty big changes. But we had better think about it. Pronto.
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