Mother Courage and Her Children - Full Play

14.07.2023

Mother Courage and Her Children, a play by Bertolt Brecht, was written in German produced in 1941, and published in 1949. 

The work, composed of 12 scenes, is a chronicle play of the Thirty Years’ War and is based on the picaresque novel Simplicissimus (1669) by Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen.

In 1949 Brecht staged Mother Courage, with music by Paul Dessau, in East Berlin. Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel, performed the title role. This production led to the formation of Brecht’s own theatre company, the influential Berliner Ensemble.

Synopsis:

The plot revolves around a woman who depends on war for her personal survival and who is nicknamed Mother Courage for her coolness in safeguarding her merchandise under enemy fire. The deaths of her three children, one by one, do not interrupt her profiteering.

Bertold Brech was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. 

Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the Verfremdungseffekt.

During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI.

After the war, he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel.

Brecht, The Doors, Alabama Song:

'The "Alabama Song' also known as "Moon of Alabama", "Moon over Alabama", and "Whisky Bar' is an English version of a song written by Bertolt Brecht and translated from German by his close collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann in 1925 and set to music by Kurt Weill for the 1927 play Little Mahagonny. 

It was reused for the 1930 opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and has been recorded by The Doors and David Bowie.

I think ı have enough natural talent to become a serious theater play actor.