Authors: Bertolt Brecht
Kattrin’s death
. Kattrin falls forward, the drumsticks in her dropping hands strike one full beat followed by a feeble beat; for a moment the ensign is triumphant, then the cannon of Halle respond, taking up the rhythm of Kattrin’s drumbeats.
In sad scenes just as in comic ones precision must be combined with ease; the hand that guides the arrangement must be both firm and relaxed. The actors take their positions and form their groups in very much the same way as the marbles tossed into a wooden bowl in certain roulette-like children’s games fall into hollows, with the difference that in the games it is not decided in advance which marbles will fall into which hollows, whereas in theatrical arrangements there only
seems
to be no advance decision. And indeed the reason for the stiffness or heaviness that is so characteristic of sad scenes in the German theatre is that in tragedy the human body is unjustifiably neglected and so seems to be afflicted with muscular cramp. Which is deplorable.
Kattrin’s dumbness does not save her. The war gives her a drum. With this unsold drum she must climb up on the barn roof and save the children of Halle.
Conventional heroism must be avoided. Kattrin is ridden by two fears: her fear for the city of Halle and her fear for herself.
Audiences were especially stirred by the drum scene. Some explained this by saying that it is the most dramatic scene in the play and that the public likes its theatre dramatic rather than epic. In reality the epic theatre, while capable of portraying other things than stirring incidents, clashes, conspiracies, psychological torments and so on, is also capable of portraying these. Spectators may identify themselves with
Kattrin in this scene; empathy may give them the happy feeling that they too possess such strength. But they are not likely to have experienced such empathy throughout the play – in the first scenes, for example.
If the scene is to be saved from a wild excitement amid which everything worth noticing is lost, close attention must be given to alienation.
For example: if the conversation of the peasants is swallowed up by a general hubbub, the audience will be in danger of being ‘carried away’; then they will fail to take note how the peasants justify their failure to act, how they fortify each other in the belief that there is nothing they can do, so that the only remaining possibility of ‘action’ becomes prayer.
In view of this, the actors in rehearsal were made to add ‘said the man’ or ‘said the woman’ after each speech. For example:
‘“Sentries are bound to spot them first,” said the woman.’
‘“Sentry must have been killed,” said the man.’
‘“If only there were more of us,” said the woman.’
‘“Just you and me and that cripple,” said the man.’
‘“Nowt we can do, you’d say …” said the woman.’
‘“Nowt,” said the man,’ and so on.
Kattrin
’s
drumming
Kattrin keeps watching what is going on down below. Consequently her drumming breaks off after the following sentences,
‘Jesus Christ, what’s she doing?’
‘I’ll cut you all to ribbons!’
‘We got a suggestion could do you some good.’
‘With a mug like yours it’s not surprising.’
‘We must set the farm on fire.’
Such scenes as the one where the peasant tries to drown the noise of Kattrin’s drumming by chopping wood must be fully acted out. As she drums, Kattrin must look down at the peasant and accept the
challenge. In tempestuous scenes the director needs a certain amount of stubbornness to make miming of this sort last long enough.
Hurwicz showed increasing exhaustion while drumming.
The ritual character of despair
The lamentations of the peasant woman, whose son the soldiers have taken away and whose farm they threaten when Kattrin starts her drumming to wake the townspeople, must have a certain routine quality about it; it must suggest a ‘set behaviour pattern’. The war has been going on too long. Begging, lamenting, and informing have frozen into fixed forms: they are the things you do when the soldiery arrive.
It is worth forgoing the ‘immediate impression’ of a particular, seemingly unique episode of horror so as to penetrate a deeper stratum of horror and to show how repeated, constantly recurring misfortune has driven people to ritualise their gestures of self-defence – though of course these ritual gestures can never free them from the reality of fear, which on the stage must permeate the ritual.
[…]
12
Mother Courage moves on
The peasants have to convince Courage that Kattrin is dead. The lullaby for Kattrin. Mother Courage pays for Kattrin’s burial and receives the condolences of the peasants. Alone, Mother Courage harnesses herself to the empty cart; still hoping to get back into business, she follows the ragged army
.
The peasants have to convince Courage that Kattrin is dead
. The cart is standing on the empty stage. Mother Courage is sitting with the dead Kattrin’s head in her lap. The peasants are standing in a hostile knot at the dead girl’s feet. Courage speaks as if her daughter were
only sleeping, deliberately disregarding the reproaches of the peasants who are saying that she is to blame for Kattrin’s death.
The lullaby for Kattrin
. The mother’s face is bent low over her daughter’s face. Her song fails to pacify the peasants.
Mother Courage pays for Kattrin’s burial and receives the condolences of the peasants
. When she realises that her last child is dead, she rises painfully to her feet and hobbles around the corpse (on the right) and along the footlights to behind the cart. She comes back with a sheet of canvas. The peasants ask her if she has no one else; she answers over her shoulder: ‘Aye, one left. Eilif.’ And with her back to the audience she lays the canvas over the body. Then at the head end of the body she pulls it up over the face and stands behind the body, facing the audience. The peasant and his son give her their hands and bow ceremoniously before carrying the body away (to the right). The woman also gives Courage her hand, goes to the right and stops again in indecision. The women exchange a few words, then the peasant woman goes away.
Alone, Mother Courage harnesses heself to her empty cart; still hoping to get back into business, she follows the ragged army
. Slowly the old woman goes to the cart, unrolls the cord which Kattrin had until then been pulling, takes a stick, examines it, pulls the loop of the second cord through, wedges the stick under her arm and moves off. The last stanza of the ‘Mother Courage Song’ has begun as she is bending down over the shaft. The revolve begins to turn and Mother Courage circles the stage once. The curtain falls as she turns right rear for the second time.
The peasants’ attitude towards Courage is hostile. She has caused them great difficulties and they will have her on their hands if she cannot catch up with the departing army. As they see it, she is to blame for what has happened. Besides, she is an unsedentary element, and now in wartime belongs with the incendiaries, cut-throats and looters who follow in the wake of armies. In condoling with her by giving her their hands, they are only doing what is customary.
During the whole scene Weigel showed an almost bestial stupor. All the more beautiful was her deep bow when the body was carried away.
The lullaby must be sung without any sentimentality or desire to provoke sentimentality. Otherwise its significance is lost. The idea underlying this song is murderous: this mother’s child must fare better than other children of other mothers. By slight emphasis on the ‘
you
’, Weigel portrayed Courage’s treacherous hope of bringing her child, and perhaps hers alone, through the war. To this child who had lacked even the most ordinary things, she promised the most extraordinary.
Even in paying for the burial, Weigel gave one last hint of Courage’s character. She fished a few coins out of her leather bag, put one back and gave the peasants the rest. This did not in the least detract from the overpowering effect of desolation.
The last stanza of the ‘Mother Courage Song’ was struck up by the musicians in the box while Courage was slowly harnessing herself to the cart. It gives powerful expression to her still unshattered hope of getting her cut from the war. It gains in power if the illusion that the song is being sung by marching armies in the distance is dropped.
[…]
At the end as at the beginning the cart must be seen rolling along. Of course the audience would understand if it were simply pulled away. When it goes on rolling there is a moment of irritation (’this has been going on long enough’). But when it goes on still longer, a deeper understanding sets in.
For scene 12 the peasants’ house and the barn with roof (from scene 11) were removed from the stage; only the cart and Kattrin’s body remained. The word ‘Saxony’ in big letters is hoisted into the flies when the music starts. Thus the cart was hauled off a completely
empty stage recalling scene 1. Mother Courage described a complete circle with it on the revolving stage, passing the footlights for the last time. As usual, the stage was brilliantly lit.
In giving the peasants the money for Kattrin’s burial, Weigel quite mechanically puts back one of the coins she has taken out of her purse. What does this gesture accomplish? It shows that in all her grief the business woman has not wholly forgotten how to reckon – money is hard to come by. This little gesture has the power and suddenness of a discovery – a discovery concerning human nature, which is moulded by conditions. To dig out the truth from the rubble of the self-evident, to link the particular strikingly with the universal, to capture the particular that characterises a general process, that is the art of the realist.
After ‘I’ll manage, there isn’t much in it,’ Courage added, first in the Munich, then in the Berlin production: Tve got to get back into business.’
In the last scene Weigel’s Courage seemed to be eighty years old. And she understands nothing. She reacts only to remarks connected with the war, such as that she mustn’t be left behind, and takes no notice when the peasants brutally accuse her of being to blame for Kattrin’s death.
In 1938, when the play was written, Courage’s inability to learn from war’s unprofitable character was a prophecy. At the time of the 1948 Berlin production the wish was expressed that at least in the play Courage would understand.
In order that the realism of this play should benefit the spectator, that is, in order that the spectator should learn something, the theatre must work out a way of playing it which does not lead to audience identification with the principal character (heroine).
To judge by press reviews and statements of spectators, the original production in Zurich, for example, though artistically on a high level,
merely pictured war as a natural catastrophe and ineluctable fate, confirming the belief of the petit-bourgeois members of the audience in their own indestructibility and power to survive. But even for the equally petit-bourgeois Mother Courage the decision whether or not to join in was left open throughout the play. It follows that the production must have represented Courage’s business activity, her desire to get her cut and her willingness to take risks, as perfectly natural and ‘eternally human’ phenomena, so that there was no way out. Today the petit-bourgeois can no longer in fact keep out of the war, as Courage could have done. And probably no performance of the play can give a petit-bourgeois anything more than a real horror of war and a certain insight into the fact that the big business deals which constitute war are not made by the little people. A play is more instructive than reality, because in it the war situation is set up experimentally for the purpose of giving insight; that is, the spectator assumes the attitude of a student – provided the production is right. The proletarians in the audience, the members of a class which really can take action against war and eliminate it, must be given an insight – which of course is possible only if the play is performed in the right way – into the connection between war and commerce: the proletariat as a class can do away with war by doing away with capitalism. Here, of course, a good deal depends on the growth of self-awareness among the proletariat, a process that is going on both inside and outside the theatre.
As for the epic element in the Deutsches Theater production, indications of it could be seen in the arrangement, in the delineation of the characters, in the accurate execution of detail, and in the spirited rhythm of the entire performance. Moreover, the contradictions that pervade the play were not taken over ready-made, but worked out, and the parts, visible as such, fitted well into the whole. Nonetheless, the central aim of the epic theatre was not achieved. Much was shown, but the element of showing was absent. Only in a few rehearsals devoted to recasting was it brought out clearly. Here the actors ‘marked’, that is, they merely showed the new members of the cast certain positions and tones, and the whole took on the wonderfully relaxed, effortless, and unobtrusive quality that stimulates the spectator to think and feel for himself.