Some thoughts while watching (the first three scenes of) Brecht's original Berliner Ensemble production of Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder

 [I should preface the below by saying that I’ve enjoyed some recent productions of this play in this country, in large part because they get away from some of the bizarre baggage of the British Brechtian tradition. This doesn’t necessarily bring them any closer to Brecht, but at least they get further away from that weird indigestible ersatz Brecht we’ve been fed every so often.]
 
[If I have any thoughts while watching the rest of it, I'll post those too, but this seemed long enough to be going on with]

It's here until Thursday and I recommend watching: www.berliner-ensemble.de/be-on-demand
 
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There's an inherited performance tradition around Brecht in this country, and it is terrified by Brecht. We tend to perform it all heightened manic energy. By contrast, the acting mode in the opening scenes of this production is naturalistic to the point of being laconic. It makes the audience lean in.

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You can hear the silent attention, the ways it’s rewarded by the first big laugh 
(The boy takes after him – But he wasn’t his father – He still takes after him)
 
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Pretty much every English translation puts the first song after this first bit with the two recruiting officers. In this production, it’s the opening. Eilif and Swiss cheese sing it while moving along at a fair lick on the revolve. There’s energy on the stage. There's momentum. So when we focus on two men standing still and talking laconically, there’s already some energy in the room, and the performers don't have to strain at grabbing and holding the audience’s attention.
 
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The Verfremdungseffekte are (at least at this point) not in exaggerated or heightened acting. They’re in structure. Abrupt breaches, interrupted action.
 
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Gestus is not caricature. It’s the gestural action that communicates the situation of individual lives in material political and economic circumstances. Its affect is sometimes not materially different from naturalism; it merely emphasises the fact that character is not innate, but is formed by material circumstance. This means that we do not communicate character, we communicate circumstance.
 
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To put it another way, in terms of the world outside ourselves, we are nothing but what we do.
 
There’s no need for theatre to communicate someone’s true essence, even if that were possible; even if it were a thing. What theatre communicates is the network of relationships between people trapped together in a net of circumstance.
 
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Starting in that heightened way as British Brecht does leaves the opening scene’s confrontation between Courage and the recruiting officer nowhere to go. But the tension, the (yes) drama in this scene in Brecht’s production goes way beyond anything I’ve seen in English.
 
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The idea that Brecht is opposed to dramatic tension is one of the most ridiculous misconceptions of the English theatre. Every scene has it. It’s just that every scene builds its own, rather than borrowing from the previous scene. It builds its own and then jettisons it, and repeatedly gives the viewer space to consider how these scenes relate to one another. The relationship is not purely narrative, but sociological.
 
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The closest thing to Brechtian work anyone’s produced in the past twenty years is The Wire.
 
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The end of the opening scene, where Eilif is led off by the recruiting officer while Courage sells the sergeant a belt, is electric. The audience sees everything unfolding while Courage strikes her bargain and the result is devastating, tension through the roof. You can hear the silence in the auditorium. A minute or two later when the scene ends and is replaced by the captions introducing the next scene, the theatre is asplutter with coughing as the tension drains from the room. In the British theatre, and this is certainly true of me too, we’re addicted to maintaining that tension. This silent transition is unimaginable in the British theatre. At the very least there’d be a high-pitched tone or the sound of distant guns. Do I think there’s a way of handling these knee joints without a chaos of coughing? Of course. But the lesson here is that the tension needs to be jettisoned – even if it is replaced by something else – in order for there to be any capacity for reflection or analysis. Lack of tension does not equal lack of attention.
 
Looked at another way, it seems fine to cough when there’s no-one on stage.
 
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In the second scene, when Eilif’s voice reveals him to Courage as the guest in the general’s tent, it’s immediately clear from Weigel’s tone that Courage really feels for, loves and wants to protect her children. So when the general demands meat for his guest, you might expect her to immediately hand over the chicken she’s been bargaining for with the chef. That way her son would be guaranteed a good meal. Instead she raises the price. The chef has little choice but to find meat, and little choice but to pay it.

So often Courage is portrayed as not really caring for her children, because of she always appears to put profit first. In such productions, where she appears to care little for her children, the question of why she acts the way she acts is all-too-easily answered: she doesn’t care for them as much as she does for money. And so there's nothing at stake for her, nothing at stake in the play, and it becomes boring. And boring British A-level Brechtians will tell you that it's supposed to be boring.

But when she does care, as she palpably does here, the question why does she act this way in spite of the obvious needs and interests of her children is increasingly present. In this scene, clearly, she can turn a profit and guarantee Eilif gets a meal – she simply plays her cards better than anyone else. In the wider scheme of the play, she is dealt fewer and worse cards, because that’s what happens in war. So that question keeps coming up more insistently until the only remaining answer is: economically, she has no fucking choice.

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Up until this point, Brecht appears to be a much more traditional director than anyone imagined. But we have to establish something in order to disrupt it.
 
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In the second scene we’re modulating towards a patchwork that includes something more stylised. The cook and Courage remain close to something that looks like naturalism, but in the tent Eilif, the general and the parson are in a more staccato register.
 
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The precedent for the more stylised elements is not expressionism, but silent comedy. Externally the ways in which the two heighten and abstract specifics to externalised principles of movement may appear similar, but the distinction lies in what’s being emphasised. In expressionism it’s internal emotional states. In silent comedy, at least that of Chaplin, (which Brecht was obsessed by [I wrote my phd on this]) it’s gestus – social role. Hence Eilif, who in scene one seems to have three dimensions, sits ludicrously poker straight in the general’s tent as though he’s on parade, then performs his song like a marionette.
 
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Let’s not hide from the fact that the deaf-mute Kattrin is played by an able actor. Sure, we perhaps shouldn’t judge Brecht by standards of representation that didn’t exist at the time. But if we’re going to watch it now, recommend it now, we have to recognise that this is not acceptable now.
 
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Everyone always has something to do with their hands. The chef is peeling potatoes, then Courage plucks the chicken. Yvette sews a hat, then Courage works needle and cloth. The general drinks. There’s always a physical action in progress somewhere on the stage, and it always reminds us who works and who doesn’t.
 
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Let’s talk about Yvette. She’s first introduced in scene three, and most productions have her already rendered as a cartoon syphilitic hag. In this production, the only indications that she’s already begun sex work are in the text. Her clothing stays a long way from the usual clichés. This is a real woman, refusing to be defined by her social role. What we meet here is a woman still eaten up by the loss of her lover five years earlier, a lover who was part of an occupying force and who left when the army left. She pursued him, she still loves him, and she finds herself here. Again, in this production, we meet a woman more 'real' than any I’ve seen portrayed in the weird inherited tradition that is British Brecht.
 
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The part of scene three between Courage, the Chaplain and the Cook is often boring. It’s easy to miss it even in here, but just enough dramatic tension is produced by Kattrin at the side investigating Yvette’s hat and boots. (Only here are we starting to be sure Y’s already a sex worker.) Meanwhile there’s loads in the main scene that’s often missing in English translation. For example, the translation I’m referring to because my German is very ropey only makes reference to “The King” and “The Kaiser”. In Brecht’s production there’s repeated reference to Gustav Adolf. And they again and again refer to him as Adolf. I wonder why this might have felt pertinent in 50s Germany?
 
Meanwhile, the Cook’s political commentaries are all too often played as cartoonish caricature rather than the knowing cynicism we see here.

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Let's be honest, though. This scene still drags a bit.
 
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In the translation I’m referring to, the drum roll that precedes Swiss Cheese’s death appears in the stage directions, but the sound of his firing squad does not. In this production, we hear that gunfire, then Courage is contorted by despair and horror. “Mother Courage remains seated” is all it says in my copy. 

“It grows dark”, it then says, “It grows light once more. Mother Courage is sitting exactly as before”. In fact, while it’s true that she’s not moved from the spot, she’s gently rocking to and fro. The English stage directions emphasise Courage's impassivity; in Weigel's performance she is anything but.

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I have no idea what the original German stage directions say as I've no copy to hand.  But you see how easy it is, once a misconception has taken route, to find confirmation for it everywhere.

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I identify these small differences between the production and the text as available in English because I think British directors are afraid of allowing any feeling into the work.

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Or if they do, they imagine they're bravely throwing off the shackles of Brechtian orthodoxy. When in fact that orthodoxy has little or nothing to do with Brecht.

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But. Emotion floods through that celebrated dam, the alienation effect, at every turn, revealing Brecht as a man who needed a theory not because he felt too little, but too much. (This is a grotesque paraphrase of something Tynan wrote when the BE came to the Royal Court around this time.)

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Helene Weigel is fucking astonishing in this scene. The final part of it, where she has to pretend not to recognise the body of her son, astonishing. The agony on her face.
 
So much crap has built up around Brecht that everyone forgets that the theory would be nothing without a capacity to produce scenes like this. Individual humans are tortured by their helplessness in the face of powers far greater than themselves.

What Brecht did was observe that, in real lives, those powers are socially-constructed and can therefore be socially dismantled. He then developed a dramaturgy which revealed that constructedness, rather than mystifying it out of existence.

But all that would be useless if the scene itself had no impact. And yet people persist in thinking that not only is Brecht boring, he’s intentionally boring. Seriously. Watch the fucking show. You've got til Thursday.

www.berliner-ensemble.de/be-on-demand