Mother Courage in France

Mother Courage in France ANNE UBERSFELD TRANSLATED BY FRANK COLLINS The French first came to know Brecht through G.W. Pabst's two films, the Gennan and French versions of The Tlzreepenny Opera, and Kurt Weill's music had a lot to do with their enthusiasm. But they did not see what Brechtians and, indeed, Bernard Dort did see, a spectacle aimed al a public that is well-initiated into the theatre, a bourgeois public; this work is for them, maybe it has them in mind 100 much. It is, as Brecht himself writes, "a kind of condensed version of what the spectator wants 10 see of life in the theatre": a spectacle in disguise; an anti-operetta - a speclacJe-trap that the bourgeois spectator must come and fall into.... Kurt Weill's music and Brecht's songs playa major role here. Into this bourgeois super-spectacle they introduce, to the highest degree, all that can shake the bourgeois, and they make it clear that this spectacle is for them. Exalting desires of the spectators [0 which they themselves would not admit. [Brecht and Weill] undermine their idyllic participation in the spectacle.! But young spectators, undoubtedly entranced by Weill's music and the lyrics, which they also listened to on records, saw above all in The Threepenny Opera (as I have witnessed) a virulent criticism of capitalist society, based on profits that are akin to theft. They gave the playa "revolutionary" reading, a reading with which the Pabst film was entirely consonant, even though Brecht disavowed it - a fact that that we young theatre-lovers did not know, and which probably would not have bothered us much in any event. But in France it is certainly on Mother Courage that the Brecht controversy is centred, and for a very good reason. It is perhaps in this play that we best see the central theme, one that is not all that conspicuous in Brecht, of motherhood . We also see the more obvious theme of the contradictions facing human beings caught between their lust for life and the weight of all that is social Modern Drama, 42 (1999) 198 Mother Courage in France 199 or, perhaps putting it in a beller way, caught between the forces of instinct and of society. The Brechtian character most burdened by contradictions is, without doubt, Anna Fier· ling, witness the very name Mother Courage. "She is called Courage because she is afraid of losing her possessions, and she made it through that cannon fire at Riga with fifty loaves of bread in hercart " It is a contradiction that is internal to the character.... She wants to have it both ways; she wants to be both mother and canteen woman; she above all wants to keep everything for herself: her children and her belongings.2 It was Roland Barthes who, if we can put it this way, imported Mother Courage into France: he made it the object of one of his first semiological analyses ] But it is Bernard Dort who first speaks about the practical theatrical consequences of this very surprising text: The contradictions that are external to the characters [in earlier texts1 ... are inlernallo them here. They produce the character: an unstable product that is condemned to destruction. MOlher Courage is entirely in the realm of the impossible and that links Mother and Courage. The difficulty of this role in the theatre has to do with just that and. There is a great temptation, indeed, to make a contradictory heroine of Mother Courage, one who would be now a mother, now a businesswoman. but whose inner strengths would in the end bring about harmony and unity. This way the work would end up exalting Mother Courage, glorifying her almost animal forces, the very forces of human nature (forces that Brecht elsewhere assigned to Baal): the error would be flagran1.4 MONTERO 'S MOTHER COURAGE Jean Vilar commited precisely this error, deliberately, when he gave the role of Courage to Germaine Montero, an actress and singer from the South, possessing an astonishing vitality, and ready to give the whole play the aura of a play in song, which was the particular glory of The Threepenny Opera. Unity...