Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) by Bertolt Brecht Read Free Book Online Page B

make a grand international co-production with star appeal. Simone Signoret was booked as Yvette, whose part was then disproportionately inflated; the French actor Bernard Blier became the Cook. Angelika Hurwicz, the unforgettable stage Kattrin, was replaced by Sigrid Roth; difficulties were made over Helene Weigel, who had to be cast as Courage on Brecht’s insistence. In many other ways, too, Brecht’s vision and Staudte’s proved deeply incompatible. Staudte wanted to use colour, Brecht to achieve ‘daguerreotype-like’ effects in black and white; Staudte commissioned period costumes, Brecht rejected them as too operatic; Staudte’s French designer provided the heavy baronial setting seen in the surviving stills and located the camp scenes in a sandy waste, Brecht objected that the Thirty Years War didn’t take place in a desert. Staudte’s verdict was that Brecht was ‘utterly hostile to the cinema’. Shooting nevertheless began, apparently on the assumption that Brecht would feel forced to accept designs which had only been put before him at the very last moment. He did not, and as a result the whole operation had to be called off after about a fortnight’s unhappy work. It was never resumed, though plans for some kind of
Mother Courage
film continued to be discussed, this time with Engel and Burri, right up to Brecht’s death in August 1956. The film which DEFA did finally realise some four years later was made on an entirelydifferent basis, for it was a largely static film version, made in a studio and photographed in Cinemascope of the Berliner Ensemble stage production: a kind of Model-book in motion, preserving Brecht’s original vision with minor changes. Its directors were Brecht’s young assistants Manfred Wekwerth and Peter Palitzsch, who subsequently directed, respectively, the Berliner Ensemble itself and the Frankfurt city theatres.
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    It was one of Brecht’s endless inconsistencies (or ‘contradictions’) that, while believing firmly in the need for change, he established certain standard productions which other directors of his plays were expected to study before deciding their own interpretations.
Mother Courage
was a prime candidate for this treatment, thanks on the one hand to its high reputation with other theatres throughout the globe and on the other to the critical disagreements which it provoked. The ‘Mother Courage Model’ therefore consists not only of the notes which we print on pp. 277–323 but of a series of carefully-keyed photographs of the Berliner Ensemble production which exists in a published version but was originally made as a much fuller and more detailed album for loan to prospective directors. Brecht’s purpose here has often been regarded as absurdly rigid, and the Ensemble itself has been accused of putting Brecht’s works into some kind of airless museum showcase. On the one hand there have been instances of lifeless copying or resentful friction whenever the standard model was imposed; on the other it has shocked more jealously ‘original’ producers to go as far as they can in some alternative, if not actually opposite, direction. Seldom has any director done what Brecht really had in mind: that is, gone through the ‘model’ to see exactly what problems Brecht was trying to solve in each detail of his production, and how he arrived at his answers, and then gone on to think out an approach of his own based on the same understanding of the play. So the use of Model-books has proved to be a somewhat two-edged device, hindering as much as helping the assimilation of this great play, particularly by non-German theatres.
    Certainly
Mother Courage
has never become securely established in the English-speaking countries, where the size of the cast and the length of the play present a more formidable initial problem than they do in the German subsidised theatres. Generally it has proved a box-office disaster, and the one production to enjoy a long run –