Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 4

by Bertolt Brecht

  (The three Hatsos, the girl, a Czich, de Guzman, three other wealthy gentlemen.)

  ‘A Czich!’

  3

  The Czuchish tenant farmer Callas leaves his Czichish comrade Lopez to the mercy of the Iberin thugs.

  (Run-down hut, open door, the two families, the Pointed Head Lopez with his rifle, Callas has no gun – it’s on the ground, or his wife is putting it away.)

  ‘We used to be united by our woes

  But now our different head shapes make us bitter foes.’

  4

  Angelo Iberin condemns the Czich de Guzman to death for abusing his power.

  (Bench for the accused. Judge’s throne – very high –)

  ‘Look at the wretch there with his pointed head!

  Discovered in the vile abuse of power!’

  Czuchish landowners leave their Czichish fellow to the mercy of the Iberin forces.

  (as portrayed in the letter)

  ‘… You my lords

  You must stand by me in my hour of need!’

  5

  The attorney and Mother Superior haggle over the admission of the young Isabella de Guzman to the convent.

  6

  The Czuchish tenant farmer Callas parades his looted horses.

  ‘And why shouldn’t they, say I, and untie the horses.’

  7

  Encouraged by the propitious course of the civil war, Angelo Iberin enjoins Farmer Callas to return the horses.

  ‘Sir, does that mean I don’t get to keep the horses?’

  ‘No!’

  8

  Isabella de Guzman flees from the terrible demands of her imprisoned brother.

  ‘Such talk is just a token of despair!’

  ‘This close to death and everything is fair!’

  The victory bells are still tolling when Farmer Callas brings his daughter back to the establishment of Madame Cornamontis.

  ‘Ah, Madame Cornamontis, the ways of the world are strange.’

  9

  The landowner’s daughter instructs the farmer’s daughter in the three primary virtues.

  10

  Just as the attorneys are seeking a man who might go to the gallows in the landowner’s stead, Farmer Callas turns up and requests a deferment of the rents.

  ‘Señor de Guzman! Señor de Guzman, it’s Farmer Callas!’

  On death row, de Guzman barters with Farmer Callas over the terms on which the latter would take his place.

  ‘Landlord and peasant: always picking fights.

  One’s in the right, the other one has rights.’

  11

  The Viceroy shows Señor Iberin that he nearly hanged the poor

  Czuch instead of the rich Czich.

  ‘Dear Iberin, permit me to reveal

  The fish that have so hopelessly enmeshed

  Themselves within your closely knotted net.’

  Final tableau:

  [BFA 24, pp. 201–3. Early 1935. Brecht and his publisher Wieland Herzfelde wanted George Grosz to do drawings for Brecht’s plays in the Gesammelte Werke edition. These are Brecht’s (incomplete) notes for his guidance. The numbers refer to the scenes of the play. In 1937 Grosz, regrettably, turned his back on the commission. The reference in §4 is to a letter to Grosz of January 1935.]

  PROPS FOR ‘THE ROUND HEADS’

  The judge’s table in the Viceroy’s palace must clearly be the same table as that from which the victors dine at the end.

  In the convent the only piece of furniture is a small cupboard with an altar tableau on the door. When the Mother Superior locks away the deeds to the de Guzman estates it turns out in fact to be a safe.

  [BFA 24, p. 203. 1936, for the Copenhagen production.]

  ‘ROUND HEADS AND POINTED HEADS’

  The play Round Heads and Pointed Heads is a new creative adaptation of the old Italian tale which Shakespeare used in his play Measure for Measure. Many people think that Measure for Measure is the most philosophical of all Shakespeare’s works, and it is certainly his most progressive. It demands from those in positions of authority that they shouldn’t measure others by standards different from those by which they themselves would be judged. It demonstrates that they ought not to demand of their subjects a moral stance which they cannot adopt themselves. The play Round Heads and Pointed Heads seeks to propose for our own age a progressive stance similar to that which the great poet of humanism proposed for his.

  [BFA 24, p. 203. October 1936. Published in Danish: ‘Rundhoder og Spidshoder’ in Riddersalen (3, 1936), the journal of the Copenhagen theatre of that name where the play was first performed (4 November 1936).]

  THE COPENHAGEN PRODUCTION

  In the wake of a crisis on the grain market the country of Yahoo, with its tenant farmers and landowning classes, faces the prospect of rebellion by the peasant farmers, who have joined forces in an association called ‘The Sickle’. A certain Iberin suggests to the Viceroy, who is himself a landowner, that the farmers’ opposition could be disrupted by a new division of the populace into Round Heads and Pointed Heads, and by the persecution of the Pointed Heads, who are to be designated the enemies of Yahoo. The Viceroy delegates power to Señor Iberin. The parable develops as follows. The round-headed farmer Callas discovers that, in a show-trial staged by Iberin, his pointed-headed landlord has been sentenced to death for seducing the round-headed daughter of one of his tenants. Encouraged by this news Callas leaves the Sickle and expropriates for himself two of his landlord’s horses, which he needs for ploughing. Ownership of the landlord’s estate has however, in the meantime, passed pro forma to the San Barabas convent, and in another trial, initiated by the convent and again used by Señor Iberin as a show-trial, the farmer is compelled to return the horses. Iberin finds himself able to make this judgement because the Sickle has been dispersed and is defeated. The tenant farmer, hoping at least to secure himself a rent reduction, declares himself prepared to go to the gallows in the place of his landlord, for whose release things are already well under way. Equally, his daughter agrees, for money, to submit to the attentions of one of Iberin’s high officials in the place of the landlord’s sister. Now the Viceroy returns at the head of his victorious troops. Since the farmers would refuse to pay the rents if a landlord was hanged, the Viceroy releases the landlord. He sends the disillusioned tenant farmer back to his field, but with the prospect that he’ll shortly send for him again: for a great war that he’s planning with a neighbouring race of Square Heads.

  The play was performed with the means of Brecht’s epic theatre. Set design by S. Johansen. Masks by H. Horter. Remarkable actorly contributions by Anderson as Iberin and Langberg as Farmer Callas, and a charming performance in the role of the farmer’s daughter by Lulu Ziegler.

  The parable form made it possible, despite the censorship in Denmark, to perform an anti-Nazi play in a small country which abuts Germany and absolutely depends on trade with Germany. None the less, the bourgeois critics attacked the play fiercely and threatened to remove it from the programme within a week. The local fascists handed out leaflets in front of the theatre, and there were attempts to mobilise the Ministry of Justice against the play. These attempts, together with the growing public interest, had as their result that, despite the hostile press, the play can go on being performed.

  [BFA 24, pp. 204–5. November 1936. On 12 November 1936 the Copenhagen daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende reported that the writer Olga Eggers had personally asked the Minister of Justice to protest against the production of Brecht’s play in the Riddersalen Theatre.]

  NOTES ON ‘POINTED HEADS AND ROUND HEADS’

  Description of the Copenhagen première

  General

  The première was given in Copenhagen on 4 November 1936 in the Riddersalen Theatre under Per Knutzon’s direction. One can smoke and eat in this theatre; it holds 220. The stage is 7 metres wide, 8 metres deep and 10 metres high.

  Special characteristics of the parable form

  This play, t
he parable type of non-aristotelian drama, demanded a considerable sacrifice of effects of illusion on the part of actors and stage set. The preparations made so as to give point to the parable had themselves to be transparent. The playing had to enable and encourage the audience to draw abstract conclusions. During Missena’s final speech the barrel of an enormous gun was lowered on wires so that it dangled above the banquet. The tenant farmer Callas on his way to gaol (scene 10) went right through the auditorium, telling his story over again to the spectators. Small adjustments were made to the parable, so that the trial (scene 7) was conducted by Missena himself rather than by the judge, and so that (in scene 3) it was Iberin’s speech that brought about the split between the farmers’ families. (The voice from off continued after the words, ‘has taken over the government’, ‘and for us the most important thing is that our landlord has already been arrested’. After the sentence, ‘The years of misery, my children, are at an end’, came the speech during which the families move apart, and then Mrs Callas’s words, ‘I’m afraid the news isn’t quite so good for you, you’re Czichs. Señor de Guzman himself was arrested because he’s a Czich’. The arrival of the other farmers was cut.)

  Building up a part (inductive method)

  The parts were built up from a social point of view. The modes of behaviour shown by the actors had transparent motives of a social-historical sort. It was not the ‘eternally human’ that was supposed to emerge, not what any man is alleged to do at any period, but what men of specific social strata (as against other strata) do in our period (as against any other). Since actors are accustomed to rely primarily on the spectator’s empathy, which means exploiting his most easily-accessible emotions, they nearly always run a whole sequence of sentences together and give a common expression to them. But with the kind of drama under consideration it is essential that each separate sentence should be treated for its underlying social gesture [Gestus]. The characters’ unity is in no way upset by exactly reproducing their contradictory behaviour; it is only in their development that they really come to life. Nanna Callas, for example, demonstrates (in scene 6) quite clearly that she believes her father’s case to be hopeless; all the same, in front of the judge (in 7) she uses all her charm and fights like a tigress for the horses. She does not conceal from Madame Cornamontis (in 8) that she thinks her father is an ass, but immediately afterwards she is none the less moved and grateful when she bids him farewell. The figure of the leading Hatso became, by a process of a precise consideration of each individual sentence, an inductive process from sentence to sentence, one of the principal figures. A single cry of ‘Hail Iberin!’, in the scene (4) where Iberin walks amongst the crowds (‘But you, you see how hard it is …’), was enough to express his conviction. And in just a few sentences (in 6) he could make palpable the fact that his hatred for the landlord and his sympathy for the farmer come from one and the same source. Even with this great wealth of important social content, a bourgeois spectator would probably declare the characterisation to be primitive, simply because the figures do not provoke the conventional emotions; unless the actor works very carefully this may be a justified response. The work of the actors is made all the more difficult because they have more than one task. The role of Nanna Callas does not only require that the actress portray a sensible and unpretentious soul when she’s alone or amongst her own kind, and the rest of the time take on the professional airs of a prostitute; she must also speak some of the explanatory passages (in 11), as it were as the mouthpiece of the playwright, directly to the spectators. Her attitude to the whole situation casts light on the role. And that attitude must in turn be derived from the role.

  Farmer Callas was portrayed as a man worn out by work, who abandons the cause (in 3) with considerable embarrassment. He listens reluctantly to the stupid words of his wife, who is both more stupid and more of a traitor than he. It is only when Farmer Lopez refuses to understand his (Callas’s) special circumstances that he becomes a little more impatient. His incomprehension of the idealistic clichés of Iberin (in 6) makes him sympathetic; his reluctance to concern himself with the honour of his daughter has good reasons; later (in 6), when he thinks he’s got the horses, he is quite prepared to defend his daughter’s honour. In this first court scene, however, he clearly manifests that distinctive incapacity to think realistically which leads him to value a legal judgement more highly than the armed struggle. Yet he knows how much he owes to the struggle by the Sickle; that is clear from his drunken toast to Lopez (in 6). However much the actor seemed to be setting up the farmer for our disapproval, even contempt, because of his treacherous opportunism, he was still able to retain that degree of sympathy appropriate to the cheated peasant; those who had ruined him would always be more contemptible than him; and at the moment when he is beaten (in 7) he shares once more the fate of all his class (even though they are ruined more by him than by their enemies) and so gains our sympathy for the rage and despair that their defeat must inspire.

  The Viceroy, characterised as a landlord by his dress and manner of speech, is just a shade the coquette when he allows (in 1) his advisor to treat him as if he were inexperienced in business matters and uninterested in economic affairs; he prefers to adopt an unbiased stance as observer. After he has reached his decision about Iberin over the billiard table (after the words, ‘Just spit it out then: Iberin’, he brushes the remaining newspapers from the table and starts to play billiards), he exits through the stalls and returns (in 11) the same way; he could watch the whole presentation of the Iberin experiment from the stalls. In this case he could (after scene 8) hold a little speech from the stalls:

  It seems my town has put me out of mind,

  So now it’s time to contemplate return,

  With luck I may accomplish it unnoticed.

  These bells confirm that victory is mine.

  I’ll wait a while, but soon I shall be bold

  And join my friends at table, ’ere the food grows cold.

  The dark times cede, I’m sure, to a new light;

  The new moon rocks the old to sleep for one last night.

  In any case it would be good if the actor could sit in the auditorium during the rehearsals and, as Viceroy, take a stance on things. In order to deprive the Viceroy, in the last scene where he is the master of political fudge, of the utter superiority of the deus ex machina, he was portrayed as an alcoholic.

  Angelo Iberin was given no outward similarity to Hitler. The very fact that he is a sort of idealised image of a racist prophet (that is enough for the parable) prohibited that, even had the police allowed it. However, a few gestures were borrowed, partly from photographic sources. The two bows in front of the Viceroy (in 1 and 11) can only really be envisaged with the help of such material. Many people thought the tears of Iberin, who got out a large handkerchief when he heard about the return of the Viceroy (in 11), were too naive, but it is a characteristic and established ploy of such figures, like the demagogic exploitation of exhaustion after big speeches. Iberin’s use of the microphone (in 7) achieved a certain notoriety, the actor demonstrated Iberin’s almost erotic relationship with the instrument.

  The waitress Nanna Callas was portrayed as a type who as a consequence of twofold exploitation (as waitress and prostitute) has an even less developed political attitude than the farmer. Her attitude only seems to be more realistic, in fact it is bereft of all hope. The actress expressed this particularly clearly in the ‘Song of the Waterwheel’, but on many other occasions too.

  Influence the audience (by the inductive method)

  A considerable sacrifice of the spectator’s empathy does not mean sacrificing all right to influence him. The representation of human behaviour from a social point of view is meant indeed to have a decisive influence on the spectator’s own social behaviour. This sort of intervention necessarily is bound to release emotional effects; they are deliberate and have to be controlled. A creation that more or less renounces empathy need not by any means be an ‘unfeeli
ng’ creation, or one which leaves the spectator’s feelings out of account. But it has to adopt a critical approach to his emotions, just as it does to his ideas. Emotions, instincts, drives are generally presented as being deeper, more eternal, less easily influenced by society than ideas, but this is in no way true. The emotions are neither common to all humanity nor incapable of alteration; the instincts neither infallible nor independent of reason; the drives neither uncontrollable nor only spontaneously engendered, and so on. But above all the actor must bear in mind that no worthwhile feeling can be compromised by being brought clearly and critically to the conscious level. The character’s piecemeal development, as he initiates more and more relationships with other characters, consolidating or expanding himself in continually new situations, produces a rich and sometimes complicated emotional curve in the spectator, a fusion of feelings and even a conflict between them.

  Verfremdung [Alienation]

  Certain incidents in the play should be treated as self-contained scenes and raised – by means of inscriptions, musical or sound effects and the actors’ way of playing – above the level of the everyday, the obvious, the expected (i.e. they are verfremdet).

  In scene 1:

  the Viceroy of Yahoo reads in the newspapers that his country is bankrupt;

  the Viceroy learns, over a game of billiards, that according to the racist prophet Iberin it is not he and the other landlords who are responsible for the misery of the tenant farmers, but people with pointed heads;

  the Viceroy receives and takes a good look at the racist prophet Iberin.

  In scene 2:

  the petty bourgeois learn from the newspaper that they have a new ruler;

  the brothel madam Cornamontis, who is the first to fly the Iberin flag, announces that she won’t be employing Czich girls in her establishment any more;

  the economic rivalries between shopkeepers develop into pogroms;

  a pointed-headed grocer is threatened for not flying the Iberin flag;