Mother Courage

Old Stage, Green Hall

“Не should have a long spoon that sups with the devil” — such was the proverb that Brecht chose as his signifying epigraph for Mother Courage. Bertolt Brecht wrote about how it is inevitable that one must pay for keeping company with a force as blind and terrible as war. He wished to write a play of warning but said, “writers can’t compose their works as quickly as governments launch wars, because to write you must have time to reflect… Mother Courage and Her Children came too late.” The play was finished in 1939 when World War II had already begun.

In Kirill Vytoptov’s production Mother Courage does not need “a long spoon.” She cannot “learn wisdom by her own mistakes” because she does not and cannot remember. She is not so much a merchant who moves behind enemy lines selling boots, vodka and ammunition as she is an insect pinned down in No Man’s Land, somewhere beyond life’s limits. “It seems I sell tar in Hell,” Courage says. Indeed, this is probably what Hell is like. There is no good or evil here; the struggle for a can of food may be more vicious than any military battle. In fact, there is no war here, just signs that it exists — noises and voices heard over a radio. Nobody knows if these voices are friendly or hostile. There is nothing here but an overpowering hunger for profit that occasionally begins to resemble a wolf’s appetite.