Mother Courage was first performed in Zurich in 1941 and is usually seen as Brecht's greatest work. Remaining a powerful indictment of war and social injustice, it is an epic drama set in the seventeenth century during the Thirty Years' War. The plot follows the resilient Mother Courage who survives by running a commissary business that profits from all sides. As the war claims all of her children in turn, the play poignantly demonstrates that no...
Our son used the book this summer to become familiar with the play. He was selected to be one of the characters and the book helped him.
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In what appears to be a permanent war in Iraq it is not untimely to address the question posed by Bertolt Brecht of how individuals caught up on the margins of warfare cope, for good or evil, with the traumas, unappetiting personal decisions and unmitigated horror of it. Brecht, the master Communist playwright, has taken a story of a working mother's struggle to survive as a camp following petty merchant in the Thirty Years...
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Saying that Brecht didn't want his plays to evoke an emotional response is an extreme oversimplification of his theories. He just didn't want the emotional response to overwhelm the intellectual response and remove the audience's capacity to judge the work objectively. In this play, we have a heroine who is not a heroine. We understand her, but we never empathize with her. Consequently, the interdependence of war and economy...
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Brecht doesn't want emotion because that is Brechtian theater. He thought that in order for a play to invoke social change, it needed to be clear to the audience, that the audience needed to learn something. Emotions, Brecht felt, clog the mind and only feed the brain sentiment, not rational thought. Mother Courage and Her Children is, quite obviously, an anti-war play. Brecht wants you to see that war makes criminals out...
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I had to read this for my English/Theater class, and I found it to be extremely compelling and profound. Our teacher told us that Brecht doesn't want to evoke an emotional response, but even so, I was strongly moved by the events that transpire, and Kattrin's ultimate sacrifice. I also had to compare David Hare's version with the translations of Manheim and Bentley, and I found that Hare's was the sharpest because of...
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