Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (49 page)

Mother Courage haggles over the amount of the bribe
. Courage has set Kattrin and the chaplain to washing glasses and scouring knives, thus creating a certain atmosphere of siege. Standing centre stage between her family and the whore, she refuses to give up her cart entirely – she has fought too hard for it. She sits down again to scour knives and does not stand up when Pottier comes back with the news that the soldiers are asking two hundred florins. Now she is willing to pay.

Mother Courage hears the volley that lays Swiss Cheese low
. No sooner has Courage sent Pottier away than she suddenly stands up and says: ‘I think I bargained too long.’ The volley rings out, the chaplain leaves her and goes behind the wagon. It grows dark.

For fear of giving herself away, Courage denies her dead son
. Yvette walks slowly out from behind the wagon. She scolds Courage, warns her not to give herself away, and brings Kattrin out from behind the wagon. Her face averted, Kattrin goes to her mother and stands behind her. Swiss Cheese is brought in. His mother goes over to him and denies him.

The arrangement of the movements and groupings must follow the rhythm of the story and give pictorial expression to the action. In scene 3 a camp idyll is disrupted by the enemy’s surprise attack.
The idyll should be composed from the start in such a way as to make it possible to show a maximum of disruption. It must leave room for people to run to and fro in clearly laid-out confusion; the parts of the stage must be able to change their functions.

At the beginning of the scene Kattrin is hanging out washing on a clothes-line stretched between the cart and the cannon right rear so that Courage can hurriedly take it down at the end of the scene. In order to rescue her washing, Courage must go diagonally right across the stage. Kattrin sits huddled by the barrel right front, where at the beginning Yvette was being served as a customer; Courage takes soot from the cart and brings it to the barrel to rub on her daughter’s face. The same place which up until then had been devoted exclusively to business is now the scene of a private incident. Carrying the cash-box, Swiss Cheese enters diagonally from right rear to the cart left front in such a way that his path crosses that of Courage hurrying to her daughter. First she runs a few steps past him, but she has seen the cash box and turns round towards him just as he is about to enter the cart. She stands for a moment like a hen between two endangered chicks, undecided which to save first. While she is smearing her daughter’s face, her son hides the cash box in the cart; she cannot reprove him until she has finished with her daughter and comes back out of the cart. She is still standing beside him when the chaplain rushes out from behind the cart and points to the Swedish flag. Courage runs to it centre rear and takes it down.

The camp idyll that is disrupted by the attack must be divided into distinct parts. After the shady little deal in black-market ammunition has been completed by the cart steps, Swiss Cheese followed by the ordnance officer goes out right. The ordnance officer recognises the camp whore who is sitting by the barrel, sewing her hat; he looks away in disgust. Yvette shouts something after him, and then, when the centre of gravity has shifted to the right side of the stage, Courage also comes slowly over to the barrel. (A little later Kattrin follows, coming out from behind the cart and starting once more to hang up the washing.) The two women talk and Kattrin listens as she hangs up the washing. Yvette sings her song. With a provocative gait, she goes out from right front to left rear. Kattrin watches her and is admonished by her mother. The cook and the chaplain come in from the right rear. After a brief bit of banter during which they attract the attention of the audience to Kattrin by the attention they pay to her, Mother Courage leads them behind the wagon. The political discussion and Kattrin’s pantomine follow. She imitates Yvette, walking over the same ground. The alarm begins with the ordnance officer and soldiers running in
from right rear. The cook goes out in that direction after Courage has run to the cannon to rescue her washing and Kattrin to the barrel to hide her feet.

Courage’s unflagging readiness to work is important. She is hardly ever seen not working. It is her energy and competence that make her lack of success so shattering.

The tiny scene at the beginning of 3, in which army property is black-marketed, shows the general and matter-of-fact corruption in army camps during the great war of religion. The honest son listens with half an ear, as to something quite usual, his mother does not conceal the crooked business from him, but admonishes him to be honest because he is not bright. His heeding of this advice is going to cost him his life.

Kattrin has the example of Yvette before her. She herself must work hard; the whore drinks and lolls about. For Kattrin too the only form of love available in the midst of the war would be prostitution. Yvette sings a song showing that other forms of love lead to grave trouble. At times the whore becomes powerful by selling herself at a high price. Mother Courage, who only sells boots, must struggle desperately to defend her cart against her. Mother Courage of course makes no moral condemnation of Yvette and her special type of business.

The colonel whom Yvette lugs in to buy Courage’s cart for her is difficult to play, because he is a purely negative quantity. His only function is to show the price the whore must pay for her rise in life; consequently he must be repellent. [Georg-Peter] Pilz portrayed the aged colonel subtly, making him mime an ardent passion of which he was not for one moment capable. The old man’s lechery erupted as though in response to a cue, and he seemed to forget his surroundings. An instant later he forgot his lechery and stared absently into the void.
The actor produced a striking effect with his stick. In his passionate moments he pressed it to the ground so hard that it bent; an instant later it snapped straight – this suggested loathsome aggressive impotence and produced an irresistibly comic effect. Considerable elegance is required to keep such a performance within the bounds of good taste.

Having finished hanging up the washing, Kattrin stares open-mouthed at the visitors from the general’s tent. The cook honours her with special attention as he follows Courage behind the cart. This is probably what gives her the idea of stealing Yvette’s weapons.

While on one side of the cart the war is being discussed with frank mockery, Kattrin is appropriating some of the tools of the whore’s trade and practising Yvette’s swaying gait, which she has just seen. Here [Angelika] Hurwicz’s facial expression was strained and deeply serious.

The first part of Kattrin’s pantomime occurs after ‘I wasn’t mistaken in your face.’ (The cook added: ‘This is a war of faith.’) At this point Courage, the cook and the chaplain placed themselves to one side of the cart in such a way that they could not see Kattrin, and struck up ‘A stronghold sure’. They sang it with feeling, casting anxious glances around them as though such a song were illegal in the Swedish camp.

It must be brought out that Courage is used to such surprises and knows how to handle them. Before she thinks about saving the cannon, she rescues her washing. She helps the chaplain to disguise himself, she smears her daughter’s face, she tells her son to throw the cash box away, she takes down the Swedish flag. All this she does as a matter of routine, but by no means calmly.

[…]

Courage has prepared it. Enlarged by the new employee who was a chaplain only that morning, the little family still seem somewhat flurried; in talking they look around like prisoners, but the mother is making jokes again; the Catholics, she says, need trousers as much as the Protestants. They have not learned that honesty is just as mortally dangerous among Catholics as among Lutherans.

The chaplain has found a refuge. He has his own bowl to eat from and he makes himself awkwardly useful, hauls buckets of water, scours knives, and so on. Otherwise he is still an outsider. For this reason or because of his phlegmatic disposition he shows no exaggerated involvement in the tragedy of the honest son. While Courage is engaged in her unduly prolonged bargaining, he looks upon her simply as his source of support.

It seems to be hard for an actor to repress his pity for the character he is playing and not to reveal his knowledge of his impending death. In speaking to his sister Swiss Cheese shows no forebodings; this is what makes him so moving when he is taken.

The short conversation between dumb Kattrin and Swiss Cheese is quiet and not without tenderness. Shortly before the destruction we are shown for the last time what is to be destroyed.

The scene goes back to an old Japanese play in which two boys conclude a friendship pact. Their way of doing this is that one shows the other a flying bird, while the second shows the first a cloud.

Kattrin gesticulates too wildly in telling her mother about the arrest of Swiss Cheese. Consequently Courage does not understand her and
says: ‘Use your hands, I don’t like it when you howl like a dog, what’ll his reverence say? Makes him uncomfortable.’ Hurwicz made Kattrin pull herself together and nod She understands this argument, it is a strong one.

While the sergeant was questioning her in the presence of Swiss Cheese, Courage rummaged in a basket – a busy business woman with no time for formalities. But after the sentence: ‘And don’t you twist his shoulder’ she ran after the soldiers who were leading him away.

Yvette runs back and forth three times for the sake of Courage’s son and her cart. Her anger changes from mere anger at Courage’s attempt to swindle her by paying her out of the regimental cash box to anger at Courage’s betrayal of her son.

The portrayal of dumb Kattrin is not realistic if her goodness is stressed to the point of making her oppose her mother’s attempt to get the amount of the bribe reduced. She runs off from scouring the knives when she begins to see that the bargaining has been going on too long. When after the execution Yvette sends her ahead and she goes to her mother with her face averted, there may be a reproach in this – but above all she cannot look her in the face.

Courage is sitting, holding the hand of her daughter who is standing. When the soldiers come in with the dead boy and she is asked to look at him, she stands up, goes over, looks at him, shakes her head, goes back and sits down. During all this she has an obstinate expression, her lower lip thrust forward. Here Weigel’s recklessness in throwing away her role reached its highest point.

(The actor playing the sergeant can command the spectator’s
astonishment by looking around at his men in astonishment at such hardness.)

Her look of extreme suffering after she has heard the shots, her unscreaming open mouth and backward-bent head probably derived from a press photograph of an Indian woman crouched over the body of her dead son during the shelling of Singapore. Weigel must have seen it years before, though when questioned she did not remember it. That is how observations are stored up by actors. – Actually it was only in the later performances that Weigel assumed this attitude.

[…]

4

The Song of the Grand Capitulation

Mother Courage is sitting outside the captain’s tent; she has come to put in a complaint about damage to her cart; a clerk advises her in vain to let well alone. A young soldier appears, also to make a complaint; she dissuades him. The bitter ‘Song of the Grand Capitulation’. Courage herself learns from the lesson she has given the young soldier and leaves without having put in her complaint
.

Mother Courage is sitting outside the captain’s tent; she has come to put in a complaint about damage to her cart; a clerk advises her in vain to let well alone. The clerk comes up to the bench where Courage is sitting and speaks to her kindly. She remains obstinate
.

A young soldier appears, also to make a complaint; she dissuades him, arguing that his anger is too short. Two soldiers enter. The younger wants to rush into the captain’s tent and the older is holding him back by main force. Courage intervenes and involves the young man in a conversation about the danger of short attacks of anger
.

The bitter ‘Song of the Grand Capitulation’. The young soldier, whose anger has evaporated, goes off cursing
.

Courage herself learns from the lesson she has given the young soldier, and leaves without putting in her complaint
.

In the first rehearsals Weigel opened this scene in an attitude of dejection. This was not right.

Courage learns by teaching. She teaches capitulation and learns it. The scene calls for bitterness at the start and dejection at the end.

In no other scene is Courage so depraved as in this one, where she instructs the young man in capitulation to the higher-ups and then puts her own teaching into effect. Nevertheless Weigel’s face in this scene shows a glimmer of wisdom and even of nobility, and that is good. Because the depravity is not so much that of her person as that of her class, and because she herself at least rises above it somewhat by showing that she understands this weakness and that it even makes her angry.