A Model of Courage

The history of Mother Courage has been forever shaped by one production, perhaps more profoundly than any other play in the Western tradition. Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife and the co-founder of the Berliner Ensemble, gave the first German performance of Mother Courage at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater in 1949, and after more than fifty years, her portrayal of the resourceful peddler who makes a living from the Thirty Years War remains definitive.

The Berlin staging of Mother Courage provided the fifty-one-year-old Brecht with his first major success as a playwright directing his own work. The production toured throughout Europe and remained in the repertory of the Berliner Ensemble for more than a decade. Brecht compiled a meticulous photographic record of his staging, later published with his rehearsal notes and a detailed commentary as the Courage Model Book. This outstanding archive, together with a 1960 film of the Berliner Ensemble’s performance, has preserved Helene Weigel’s Courage as a cultural icon to be imitated or subverted by all subsequent productions.

Although Weigel’s is the most famous portrayal of Mother Courage, it was not for her that Brecht first wrote the part. In 1939 Weigel and Brecht had fled from Nazi persecution and sought refuge with friends in Sweden. Five months later, when Germany invaded Poland, Brecht was filled with a rage that found artistic expression in the first draft of Mother Courage, which he completed in only five weeks. Anticipating that the play would receive its premiere in Stockholm, Brecht wrote the title role for the Swedish actress Naima Wifstrand. Since Helene Weigel spoke no Swedish he invented a silent part for her, Courage’s mute daughter Kattrin.

The play proved too politically inflammatory to be produced in Stockholm at a time when Hitler made no secret of his designs on Scandinavia, and the first performance of Mother Courage took place two years later in Zürich. Brecht did not see the production – by 1941 he was already planning his escape to Hollywood – though he read reviews that criticized Therese Giehse’s portrayal of Courage as excessively sentimental, and he rewrote portions of the text accordingly. The Brecht scholar Peter Thomson counters these charges, quoting an audience member who characterized Giehse’s Courage as dry-eyed and unheroic, precisely as Brecht had intended. She was, he says, “not beautiful and was built like a dumpling with the face of a basset hound. Not a sexually attractive woman. Thank God. She was ordinary, sly, sometimes sour.”

In the entire history of the role, only Ghiese’s Courage can claim to be free of the influence of Weigel. Even before Weigel’s Berlin debut, Brecht had realized that few other actress could perform the part successfully – when the honey-voiced Eva La Gallienne let it be known she wished to play Courage, Brecht replied, “over my dead body.” In 1945 he told his German publisher Peter Suhrkamp, “I wrote the leading part for Weigel, who in various roles in exile has developed a very special style for it. So any theatre that is interested in a production should arrange for a guest production by Weigel.”

Brecht had to wait four more years to present the play and Weigel’s special performing style. He returned to Germany in 1948, fleeing the States after a close encounter with the House Committee for Un-American Activities, and was quickly offered a production at the Deutsches Theater, the principal house of what later became East Berlin. Brecht chose Mother Courage to mark his homecoming, and assembled a cast of actors who the following year formed the core of his new theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble.

The special style that Brecht had praised in Weigel and that he developed further at the Berliner Ensemble, was an extension of the techniques of “epic theatre” that he had been practicing for almost thirty years. Simply put, Brecht held that actors should not embody character naturalistically, in the manner prescribed by the Russian master Konstantin Stanislavsky. Representing reality, he believed, lulled audiences into a state of passive empathy, diminishing their objective intellectual engagement with the events of the play. Brecht trained his actors not simply to perform their roles, but also to play themselves, so that both actor and character were visible as if layered images on a double-exposed photograph. This self-consciously presentational style forced audiences to reflect actively on the artifice of theatre, and to eschew empathetic response in favor of social and political analysis. Weigel was perhaps the finest of all epic actors; “Her way of playing Mother Courage was hard and angry” Brecht once wrote, “that is, her Mother Courage was not angry; she herself, the actress, was angry” at the stupidity of the character she was playing.

Brecht developed an array of staging techniques to heighten the self-conscious nature of epic theatre. Along with the famous banners that proclaimed the title and location of each scene and the half-curtains that quickly divided the set into separate playing spaces, Brecht and his actors evolved a complex vocabulary of movement and stage business which, Brecht said, “filled in the printed text’s conclusions about certain events.” The Courage Model Book illustrates this physical life in detail, and Brecht hoped that future directors of the play would pay close attention to his annotations and photographs. Without reference to the Model, he argued, certain episodes in the play would not be entirely clear. In the final scene, for example, where Courage gives the peasants money for Kattrin’s burial, the Model indicates that Weigel counted her coins and put one back in the large purse she always wore round her neck. Her gesture is not suggested in the play’s stage directions, but Brecht regarded it as a crucial moment, because her penny-pinching behavior destroyed any sympathy the audience might feel for her and therefore allowed them to view her actions dispassionately.

Brecht intended the Model to serve as a kind of instruction manual for his new mode of theatre. As he told an interviewer in 1949, “As it stands, Mother Courage can also be staged in the old way. But this would mean doing without the specific effects of such a play, and its social function would misfire. The first thing a cart-driver would have said if left alone with the automobile would have been, ‘What’s so new about that?’ Whereupon he would have harnessed up four pairs of horses to it and driven off.” He did not, however, expect future productions to adhere slavishly to the Model. Quite the reverse. “The Model must not be pressed too far,” Brecht wrote in his introduction. “Anyone who deserves the name of artist is unique; he can neither be perfectly imitated nor give a perfect imitation. The use of models is a particular kind of art, and just so much can be learned from it. The aim must be neither to copy the pattern exactly nor to break away from it at once.”

Nevertheless, the majority of productions of Mother Courage have attempted to imitate the Brecht/Weigel staging to various degrees, often with poor results. Brecht himself often noted that the stylistic traits of Epic Theatre could not be learned instantly. He and his actors would rehearse conventionally for several months before developing the layers of self-conscious performance that Weigel perfected. When the experimental director Joan Littlewood staged the British premiere of Mother Courage at the Devon Arts Festival in 1955, Littlewood herself performed the title role, and attempted to imitate Weigel’s style after only three weeks of rehearsal. Kenneth Tynan, one of the first English critics to recognize the importance of the play, wrote scathingly of her performance. “Littlewood plays it in a lifeless mumble, looking both over-parted and under-rehearsed,” he observed. “The result is a production in which discourtesy to a masterpiece borders on insult, as if Wagner were to be staged in a school gymnasium.”

Over the past fifty years a series of British actresses have taken on the role – most acknowledging Weigel in their performances, none with unqualified success. Judi Dench, in a production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, employed the physical trappings of Brecht’s production – covered wagon, scene titles, oversized purse – but discarded the aesthetic principles that generated them. According to the scholar Peter Thomson, Dench’s Courage was “endearingly randy,” “the kind of person who, in the everyday world, is affectionately termed a ‘character.'” The play was stripped of political ideology, and although the audience found the result “reassuringly familiar,” Thomson and others criticized its flagrant disregard for the author’s intentions.

Diana Rigg’s performance at the National Theatre in 1995 was criticized in similar terms, and displayed, according to Michael Billington of the Guardian, “nothing more than a vague war-is-hell sentiment.” She, like Dench, evoked sympathetic responses from the audience, in contrast to the “hard and angry” Weigel, who deliberately subverted their compassion. When Glenda Jackson performed the role at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, however, she was attacked by the opposite team. Criticizing her snarling portrayal in terms that would have been anathema to Brecht, Nicholas de Jongh found that “you could no more squeeze blood from a stone than you could extract a milligram of pathos from Jackson’s Mother Courage.”

British performances of Mother Courage have tended to sentimentalize the play while quoting liberally from Brecht’s visual aesthetic, and the same was certainly true of Anne Bancroft’s under-rehearsed New York premiere that opened on Broadway in 1963 and closed after less than three months. But subsequent American productions have attempted to distance themselves more radically from the Brecht/Weigel production. In 1975 Richard Schechner directed an adaptation at the Performing Garage with Joan MacIntosh as Courage. A complex system of ladders, ropes, and pulleys formed the set, ultimately transforming into a giant deathtrap for Swiss Cheese and Kattrin. During the opening scenes the actors cooked a meal which they shared with the audience at intermission; afterwards they opened the theatre’s doors and enacted the play’s later episodes on the wintry SoHo sidewalk.

Schechner’s production was vehemently unsentimental in its interpretation – as her parting shot, Courage stripped her dead daughter down to her underwear in order to sell her clothes. The same was not true of Ntozake Shange’s 1980 adaptation, directed by Wilford Leach at the New York Public Theater and starring Gloria Foster and Morgan Freeman. Shange moved the action of the play to the Texas and Oklahoma Territories during the decade after the Civil War, when black troops were recruited to suppress unruly Native Americans and former slaves. The transposition was problematic, and most critics found the production both overtly sentimental and politically naïve.

One of the most successful American performances of Courage was also the closest to Weigel’s original. Linda Hunt played the role at the Boston Shakespeare Company in a production directed by Timothy Mayer in 1984 and provided, according to Arthur Holmberg (now A.R.T.’s Literary Director) writing in Theatre Review, “certainly the finest portrayal we have had in the Anglo-Saxon world.” Although several critics condemned Mayer’s attempts to milk the text for easy laughs, they praised Hunt’s performance in terms strikingly similar to descriptions of Weigel and Giehse. Frank Rich of the New York Times particularly admired Hunt’s traditional approach. “As Brecht intended,” he wrote, “Miss Hunt’s Anna Fierling is not a sentimental heroine to be applauded for her spiritual indomitability, but a feisty cunning operator caught in the facts of capitalism.” Holmberg concurred: “Unlike Anne Bancroft, she doesn’t use charm to con us. Linda Hunt has no charm and that’s her greatest asset.”

As A.R.T. prepares the first American Mother Courage of the twenty-first century, we face the same fundamental questions that Brecht raised in the Courage Model Book. To what extent is it possible, or even desirable, to replicate the aesthetic of a production that took place more than fifty years ago? His meticulous record, Brecht reminded us, was intended “not to render thought unnecessary but to provoke it: not as a substitute for artistic creation but as its stimulus.” As a playwright who freely adapted the work of earlier dramatists, Brecht knew that freezing the artist’s impulse to innovate was certain death in the theatre. Nevertheless, as the production history of Mother Courage demonstrates, the spirit of Helene Weigel will be stalking our rehearsal hall. Whether we choose to embrace or reject the aesthetic she represents, we avoid confronting her presence at our peril.

Gideon Lester is A.R.T.’s Resident Dramaturg.