Mobilizing Maurya: J.M. Synge, Bertolt Brecht, and the Revolutionary Mother

Bertolt Brecht’s decision to transform J.M. Synge’s 1904 tragedy Riders to the Sea into a propaganda play about the Spanish Civil War called Señora Carrar’s Rifles (1937) has long baffled scholars, partly because Brecht’s interest in the play cannot be accounted for within an Irish studies paradigm and partly because Riders appears, to most Brecht scholars, to be the antithesis of Brecht’s vision of epic theatre. In this essay, I investigate the circumstances under which Señora Carrar’s Rifles was written and produced to show how and why Brecht came to see Riders to the Sea as a useful model in his ongoing attempt to dramatize the coming to political consciousness of the working-class mother. Considering both the pressures that were forcing Brecht back toward realism and the failure of his attempts to elicit an “epic” performance of his play The Mother from the New York-based Theatre Union in 1935, I argue that Brecht’s engagement with Riders is an attempt to learn from previous mistakes and to put into practice what the Theater Union Mother taught him about staging maternal grief. Riders was useful to Brecht because it showed him how to bring the working-class mother to her radicalizing epiphany within the context of realism and without resorting to the epic and alienating techniques used in The Mother. This reading not only leads us to question standard readings of Maurya’s famous renunciation of grief and mourning at the end of Riders to the Sea but to complicate our understanding of the emotional dynamics of Brechtian epic theatre.