Mother Courage and her Children

July 2018 

Mother Courage and her Children 

Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and her Children. Translated by Tony Kushner, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009 

Bertol Brecht’s near scientific approach to play creation is unavoidable in the sprawling epic Mother Courage. His alienation techniques come out full force as he creates representative characters that you really aren’t supposed to love. Mother Courage holds a mirror up to the atrocities of war by distilling them down to a single family of war-profiteers, run by the fierce and jaded Mother Courage herself. She is good and evil, she loves her children while constantly insulting them, she hates the war but always seeks to profit off of it. The complexity of the main character speaks to the complexities of the human relationship with war. That there is a war is clear, but the simple people that make up the story have no idea why. Something to do with a religion they don’t care about? Yet they continue to fight, because that’s what they do. The end of the play is a stunning picture of sacrifice, when a mute girl decides to speak up to save a town from destruction, the truest act of courage in the play. But what of Mother Courage herself? She continues on, a skeleton of what she used to be, hoping in the war even as it is killing her family. It leaves an audience wondering why we must have war, and perhaps the only way things will change is by the “voiceless” finally deciding to speak up.