"Mother Courage' at Villanova (1st review)

Speaking of endless wars....

ROBERT ZALLER

The stage for the Villanova Theatre’s production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children is bare but for a map of Central Europe chalked out on its surface, and a road sign pointing in various lethal directions. The map is a generic route for death, more suggestive of the Balkan wars of the 1990s than of the Thirty Years’ War that is Brecht’s ostensible subject. If one were to bring it fully up to date, it would include Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the arc of violence unleashed (so far) across the Middle East by George W. Bush’s carnival of death. Indeed, with a new generational war cycle in prospect, Mother Courage may be more relevant to us now than at any time since Brecht wrote the play in the midst of World War II.

Brecht mined history for the subjects of his epic theater, but, as a journal note contemporary with Mother Courage makes clear, he found in war itself his paradigmatic subject. “The war,” he wrote, “displays a remarkably epic character; it teaches mankind about itself, reads a lesson, a text to which the thunder of gunfire and the exploding bombs merely provide the accompaniment.”

The Marxist vs. the artist

This sentiment is echoed at the play’s beginning by a sergeant, who praises war as the source of virtue, indeed of civilization itself, without which humanity lapses into the somnolence that is the true state of barbarism. Such a conceit, provocative today, would have been merely conventional in the 17th Century, when war was regarded as the norm in human affairs and prolonged peace as unnatural and debilitating. Brecht himself plays Devil’s advocate with it, for, as a doctrinaire Marxist, he construed war as a regressive expression of class antagonism and imperial conflict. Surely, in a socialist world, warfare would be seen as a part of human prehistory, as repugnant to enlightened consciousness as human sacrifice?

And yet, as the artist— that is, the cynical realist— in him knew, the shedding of blood, whatever form it took, was an endemic human trait, and not so easily dispensed with. Mother Courage is certainly an antiwar play, and a great one; but it is also a play about war, its fascination as well as its horror. This is what makes it no mere Lehrstück, as Brecht conceived of his work in his more didactic moments, but a profoundly disturbing work of art.

Peace is too risky

Mother Courage herself, the play’s central character, embodies the desperate contradictions of war. Cast into it as a victim and determined to survive, even profit as a participant, she sells stores to both sides in the conflict, while striving to protect her two sons and daughter. “Mother Courage” is, indeed, the semi-ironic title given her by both parties, partly to acknowledge her soldierly virtue (in this production, she wears quasi-military costume), and partly the indispensability of her services.

Weary as she is of the war, she can no more do without it than can the mercenary armies whose profession it is. And when peace breaks out briefly, her chief reaction is the fear that her goods will depreciate. In the end, war has become for her simply the norm of life— a business she knows well. Peace is too risky.

The world on a woman’s terms

Mother Courage may be the greatest role in Brechtian theater; it’s also the first theatrical example of an Everywoman— that is, of a feminine consciousness through which the action of a dramatic event is to be seen. Greek and Shakespearean heroines, no matter how individually powerful, exist within a world of masculine norms. When Nora rejects this world at the end of A Doll’s House, Ibsen promises us an alternative world that his subsequent plays never deliver. Shaw’s women come closer to taking the world on their own terms, but Mother Courage is arguably the first truly independent female protagonist on a Western stage.

It is through her eyes that we see a world, initially imposed on her, that she has redefined for herself and to her own advantage. It is true that she remains the victim of that world as well, and true that, for all her care and cunning, she loses her children one by one. Her fate is unbearably tragic; and yet, on some level, she remains unconquerable, and her vision the definitive one.

Not too glamorous for the part

It takes nerve and confidence to essay such a role, but Joanna Rotté of Villanova’s Drama Department brings it off with aplomb. Rotté looks at first too glamorous for the part, and too smart in her Major Barbara-style attire. But she brings a canny understatement to her performance that serves it well, and suggests the steely core that keeps her character going. In a way, Mother Courage does not understand the trade she is in, for in the last analysis she barters survival for humanity. Still, like any astute businesswoman, she keeps a final store in reserve. At the play’s end, we don’t know whether she will not have to expend it somewhere along the line, or perhaps find in it the last source of her betrayal. All we know is that she is ready to go on.

Director Shawn Kairschner moves the show along briskly, and Tim Moyer’s Cook is a strong foil to Rotté. Among the student actors, Kristen O’Rourke, as Mother Courage’s mute daughter Kattrin, is particularly good.

We have too little of Brecht these days, and more need of him than ever. Villanova has certainly brought us the right play at the right time in Mother Courage.



To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.