How would you, from a Brechtian perspective, prepare and direct the actors in the last two scenes of "Mother Courage and Her Children"?

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Caroline Field

How would you, from a Brechtian perspective, prepare and direct the actors in the last two scenes of “Mother Courage and Her Children”?

Even more than most of Bertolt Brecht’s plays, “Mother Courage and Her Children” has irony at its centre. Its central events are heartrending: a mother loses all three of her children, and her own chances for a decent life, in violent and even sadistic ways, and continues staggering onward, surviving by her wits and her sheer will.  And yet, Brecht wanted his plays to be performed in such a way that the audience would not be seduced into caring for or identifying with the characters. He wrote them so that in their very structure, they would continually remind the audience that they were just actors and that the integral part of the production is not the story, but the meaning behind it. With their rush of disconnected scenes, often framed by explicit narration, cynical violence, cruelty and suffering, Brecht’s plays tend to be the sort of challenge that any director relishes.

In the essay, I should like to attempt to convey how I would prepare and direct actors for the last two scenes of “Mother Courage”. It is often understood that Brecht did not want his actors to embody and express emotions in the way that, for instance, Stanislavski would have typically ask them to.  He preferred us to understand the complex realism behind a line like “Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sign something's wrong.” This poses choices: when Mother Courage has to cradle her dead daughter in her lap, she can either express her agony or she can bear it with stoicism and perhaps humour.  I would choose the latter, because from a Brechtian point of view, rather than Mother Courage being an audacious character who earns the audience’s respect, it would portray that she cares more about her business and exploitation of war than her own children - surely not an appropriate mindset of a mother.

To prepare my actors for this challenge, I would make sure that they had all considered their “GEST”. This means that they should be prepared to express their characters’ emotion and social attitudes in a clear, stylised way. They should do this by practicing things such as their body language and their gestures. I would want my actors to demonstrate their character rather than trying to make them naturalistic. To do this, they should act as witnesses to the story rather than participants. I would tell my actors to exaggerate their parts so that if someone took a photograph at any time during the scenes, they would be able to tell what the message is that should be coming across.

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During these last two scenes, I would want the stage crew to be seen on stage occasionally punctuating the action with various percussion instruments, chorally announcing scenes or what is about to happen (and dying as they do so to set the scene as the aftermath of war). I think that this would attempt to break the illusion of a “fourth wall”. This means that straight away, the audience would be reminded that it is just a play, and they are just actors.

I would make sure that the Lieutenant’s character is played robotically. The actor should do this by ...

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