Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 4

by Bertolt Brecht

  [BFA 24, p. 225. The text dates from 1938.]

  ART OR POLITICS?

  I understand your question. You see me sitting here and looking out across the Sound, which has nothing warlike about it. So what leads me to concern myself with the struggle of the Spanish people against its generals? But you shouldn’t forget why I am sitting here. How can I clear my writing of everything that has so affected my life? And my writing too? For I am sitting here as an exile, and one who has been deprived above all else of his listeners and readers – the people whose language I write in and who moreover are not just the customers for my writings but the objects of my most profound interest. I can only write for people I am interested in. Then imaginative writing becomes just like writing letters. And at present the people in question are being subjected to unspeakable sufferings. How am I to keep that out of my writing? And wherever I look, the moment I see a little way beyond this Sound I see people subjected to sufferings of the same kind. However, if mankind is destroyed there will not be any more art. Stringing beautiful words together is not art. How is art to move people if it is not itself moved by what happens to them? If I harden my heart to people’s sufferings how can their hearts be uplifted by what I write? And if I make no effort to find them some way out of their suffering, how are they to find their way into my works? The little play we are talking about deals with an Andalusian fisherman’s wife and her fight against the generals. I’ve tried to show how difficult it is for her to decide to fight them: how only the most extreme necessity makes her take up a rifle. It is an appeal to the oppressed to revolt against their oppressors in the name of humanity. For humanity has to become warlike in times like these if it is not to be wiped out. At the same time it is a letter to the fisherman’s wife to assure her that not everybody who speaks the German language is in favour of the generals and is despatching bombs and tanks to her country. This letter I write in the name of many Germans both inside and outside Germany’s frontiers. They are the majority of Germans, I am sure.

  BFA 22.1, pp. 356–7, dated February 1938. On the 13th of that month the play was performed in German under the direction of Brecht and Ruth Berlau in Copenhagen at Borups Højskole, with Helene Weigel as Carrar.]

  DIFFERENT WAYS OF ACTING

  (Weigel and Andreasen as Mrs Carrar)

  A comparison of Weigel’s and Andreasen’s performances in the German and Danish productions of Señor Carrar’s Rifles leads to some useful conclusions about the principles of the epic theatre. Weigel is a highly qualified professional actress and a communist, Andreasen an amateur and a communist. The two productions involved exactly the same movements and used the same set.

  The question of talent is irrelevant, since the acting differences that concern us would also be observable if the degree of talent was more or less equal.

  The greater ‘impressiveness’ which everyone saw in Weigel’s performance was attributable to factors other than superior talent.

  Both actresses respected epic principles in so far as they largely dispensed with empathy in portraying the character, and by so doing allowed the audience to dispense with it too. The difference lay in the fact that Andreasen made this less interesting than did Weigel.

  Unlike Andreasen, Weigel managed by every attitude and every sentence to permit, if not force the audience to take a line – to such an extent that those sitting near me several times expressed their displeasure at the attitude of the fisherman’s wife as she argued in favour of neutrality – by continually taking a line herself. Andrea-sen’s way of acting had the audience passively following the story. Carrar’s opinions (‘you have to be neutral’) seemed entirely natural and understandable given her environment and what we had been told of her previous history; she could in effect be no different from what she was. Her change of opinion due to a specific experience (the death of the son she had kept out of the battle, in a battle which neutrality had not eliminated) was understood in the same way. It was like following a piece of natural history wherein one repeatedly acknowledges the laws of nature. Even the detailed contradictions in the character’s attitude never emerged: Carrar’s neutrality as acted by Weigel was never one hundred per cent complete; she hadn’t always favoured neutrality and even now had her reservations about it, her appreciation of her sons’ attitude, her traits of bellicosity, her disapproval of the priest’s attitude, her traits of compromise and so on. The character Andreasen portrayed was far more passive than Weigel’s; things happened to her rather than by her agency. Nor did Andreasen show the fighter she eventually becomes as a fighter of a specific, contradictory kind (a fighter for the renunciation of force). Weigel showed a fighter for neutrality being transformed into a fighter for the abolition of fighting.

  In other words Andreasen’s performance didn’t make the story sufficiently interesting, and as a result one missed – as one did not with Weigel – any chance to empathise with the character and participate strongly and effectively in her emotions. One actually missed any use of those hypnotic powers which one is normally able to feel in the theatre. Her noble renunciation of such methods, springing from a natural sense of modesty and a high conception of dignity, became something close to a disadvantage. This way of playing the incidents, as naturally involving no contradictions, seemed to call for another type of acting if interest was to be maintained: the suggestive acting of the old-style theatre.

  The lesson for Andreasen, in view of her lack of experience and technique – in old- and new-style methods alike – is that there are two ways in which she can develop: she can master the one technique or the other. She has to learn either to make her acting suggestive, to practise empathy and induce it, to mobilise more powerful emotions, or else to define her own attitude to the character portrayed and induce the same attitude in the audience. If she wishes to do the latter, then she must develop to the point of recognition what she now more or less obscurely feels, and find ways of turning this recognition into a recognition by the audience. She must know what she is doing, and show that she knows it. She must not just be a proletarian when she acts one, but show how a proletarian woman differs from a member of the middle or lower middle class. She must be conscious of everything that is special about a proletarian and portray this in a special way.

  [BFA 24, pp. 223–5. This refers to two productions in Copenhagen, both directed by Ruth Berlau. Dagmar Andreasen played the title role in a Danish amateur production which opened on 20 December 1937, and Helene Weigel in the German production at the Borups Højskole on 13 February 1938 (as well as at the première in Paris, 16 October 1937).]

  DIALOGUE ABOUT AN ACTRESS OF THE EPIC THEATRE

  THE ACTOR: I’ve read what you’ve written about the epic theatre. And now having seen your little Spanish Civil War play, with the outstanding actress of this new method in the title part, I’m quite frankly astounded. Astounded to find it was proper theatre.

  ME: Really?

  THE ACTOR: Does it surprise you to hear that what you’ve written about this new method of acting made me expect something utterly dry, abstract, not to say schoolmasterly?

  ME: Not specially. No one likes learning these days.

  THE ACTOR: It’s not considered entertaining certainly; but it wasn’t only your demand for instruction that led me to expect something very remote from theatre, but also the fact that you seemed to be denying the theatre everything that makes it theatrical.

  ME: What, for instance?

  THE ACTOR: Illusion. Suspense. An opportunity to empathise.

  ME: And did you feel suspense?

  THE ACTOR: Yes.

  ME: Did you empathise?

  THE ACTOR: Not entirely. No.

  ME: Wasn’t there any illusion?

  THE ACTOR: Not really. No.

  ME: But you still thought it was theatre?

  THE ACTOR: Yes, I did. That was what astounded me. Don’t start crowing, though. It was theatre, but all the same it wasn’t anything like as new as I’d expect from what you wr
ote.

  ME: To be as new as that it would have to stop being theatre, I suppose?

  THE ACTOR: All I’m saying is that it’s not all that difficult to do what you’re asking for. Apart from Weigel in the lead part, it was performed by amateurs, simple workers who’d never been on a stage before; and Weigel is a great technician who quite clearly got her training in that ordinary old-style theatre which you keep running down.

  ME: You’re quite right. The new method results in proper theatre. It allows amateurs to make theatre under certain conditions, so long as they haven’t quite mastered the old methods, and it allows professionals to make theatre so long as they have partly forgotten them.

  THE ACTOR: Ha. I’d have said Weigel displayed too much technique rather than too little or just enough.

  ME: I thought she displayed not just technique but the attitude of a fisherman’s wife to the generals too?

  THE ACTOR: Certainly she displayed that. But technique as well. I mean, she wasn’t the fisherman’s wife, just acting her.

  ME: But she really isn’t a fisherman’s wife. She really was just acting her. And that’s just a fact.

  THE ACTOR: Of course; she’s an actress. But when she plays a fisherman’s wife she has to make you forget that. She showed everything that was remarkable about the fisherman’s wife’s, but she also showed she was showing it.

  ME: I get you. She didn’t create any illusion that she was the fisherman’s wife.

  THE ACTOR: She was far too conscious of what was remarkable. You could see she was conscious of it. She actually showed you that she was. But of course a real fisherman’s wife isn’t conscious of that; she’s unconscious, of course, of what’s remarkable about her. So if you see a character on stage who is conscious of that, then it plainly won’t be a fisherman’s wife that you’re seeing.

  ME: – But an actress. I get you.

  THE ACTOR: The only thing lacking was for her to look at the audience at certain points as if to ask ‘Well, do you see the sort of person I am?’. I’m sure she had developed a complete technique for sustaining this feeling in the audience, the feeling that she is not what she portrays.

  ME: Do you think you could describe such a technique?

  THE ACTOR: Suppose she had tacitly thought ‘And then the fisherman’s wife said’ before every sentence, then that sentence would have emerged very much as it did. What I mean is, she was plainly speaking another woman’s words.

  ME: Perfectly right. And why do you make her say ‘said’? Why put it in the past tense?

  THE ACTOR: Because it’s equally plain that she was re-enacting something that had happened in the past; in other words, the spectator is under no illusion that it’s happening now or that he himself is witnessing the original incident.

  ME: But the fact is that the spectator is not witnessing an original incident. The fact is that he’s not in Spain but in the theatre.

  THE ACTOR: But after all, one goes to the theatre to get the illusion of having been in Spain, if that is the play’s location. Why else go to the theatre?

  ME: Is that an exclamation or a question? I think one can find reasons for going to the theatre without wanting to be under any illusion of being in Spain.

  THE ACTOR: If you want to be here in Copenhagen you don’t have to go to the theatre and see a play which is set in Spain, do you?

  ME: You might as well say that if no one wants to be in Copenhagen one doesn’t have to go to the theatre and see a play set in Copenhagen, mightn’t you?

  THE ACTOR: If you don’t experience anything in the theatre that you could not equally well experience at home, then you don’t have to go there, that’s a fact.

  ME:

  [BFA 22, pp. 353–5. Incomplete. Possibly based on conversation with Per Knutzon, who had directed Round Heads and Pointed Heads. ]

  PROLOGUE TO ‘SEÑORA CARRAR’S RIFLES’

  Internment camp for Spanish refugees in Perpignan. Barbed wire separates a couple of French soldiers, one of whom is on guard while the other reads a paper, from three Spaniards: a worker in the uniform of the Republican militia, a youth wearing a soldier’s cap and a woman sitting motionless on the bare ground leaning against a post.

  THE NEWSPAPER READER: It’s all come out now about why the Czechoslovakian Republic didn’t fight when the Germans invaded. That ex-president of theirs fled to Chicago in the United States, and at last he’s talking.

  THE SENTRY: And what’s he said?

  The worker is intrigued and steps up to the wire to listen.

  THE NEWSPAPER READER: Here, just listen: that makes the second republic they’ve polished off this year. Well, the ex-president, he’s called Beneš...

  The worker nods impatiently.

  THE NEWSPAPER READER: What, you’ve heard of him, have you?

  How come?

  THE WORKER: We read all that in our papers last September. We had hopes. If Czechoslovakia had fought …

  THE NEWSPAPER READER: She didn’t, and you know why? She had an alliance with the Soviet Union and when the Germans started making noises this fellow Beneš asked Moscow if the Soviets would come to her aid. They said yes they would. But what happened? The big landowners formed up to Beneš and told him he mustn’t accept that aid, and they threatened to revolt if he did. They’d sooner see their country under Prussian jackboots than let the people fight alongside the Soviet Union.

  THE SENTRY: Think that’s true?

  THE NEWSPAPER READER: Of course we can’t tell. It’s in the paper, so probably it isn’t.

  THE WORKER: I’d say it was true even though it’s in the paper. Our big landowners used foreigners against their own people too.

  THE SENTRY: What did they do that for?

  THE WORKER: Don’t you know? Not even now? That’s bad, mate. How they sent the bombers in to make us keep our wooden ploughs? The forces of oppression have their own International.

  THE NEWSPAPER READER: So what you’re saying is that one people gets attacked from inside, then the big shots throw open the door to let the foreign aggressors in so they can help them, while the other is attacked from outside by foreign aggressors, then the big shots throw open the door and help them attack.

  THE WORKER: That’s how you have to see it if you’ve been through what we have.

  THE SENTRY: Perhaps it’s just no use fighting. The Czechs didn’t fight, so of course they were beaten. But you lot fought. Well, you’ve been beaten too, so what’s the point of fighting?

  THE NEWSPAPER READER: What you got to say to that?

  THE WORKER: Plenty. Your best answer would come from that woman, only she doesn’t know your language. She’s my sister. She used to live in a small fishing village in Catalonia with her two sons. That boy’s the only one she’s got left. She asked the same question: What’s the point of fighting? She didn’t keep on asking it right up to the last moment, but for a very long time she did, almost up to the last moment, and a lot of her sort went on like her asking that question ‘What’s the point of fighting?’ for a very long time, almost up to the last moment. And the fact that they went on asking it for so long was one of the reasons why we got beaten, see, and if one day you find yourself asking the same question as them you’ll get beaten too.

  THE NEWSPAPER READER: Tell us how it all happened, will you?

  THE WORKER: Right, I will. As I said, she was living in a village in Catalonia when the generals and the big landowners began their revolt. She had two sons and kept them out of the fighting for a long time. But one evening …

  EPILOGUE TO ‘SEÑORA CARRAR’S RIFLES’

  The internment camp at Perpignan. The worker on the other side of the barbed wire has finished telling his story. The newspaper reader passes him a cigarette.

  THE WORKER: Yes, that’s how Maria Carrar went into the fight – even her – against our own generals and against a whole world, of which one part helped to crush us while the other part looked on; and that’s how she was defeated. And her rifles once again disapp
eared beneath some floorboards, somewhere.

  THE NEWSPAPER READER: Do you suppose they’ll be brought out again ever?

  THE WORKER: I know they will, because she knows what the fight is about now.

  [BFA 4, pp. 335–7. The Prologue and Epilogue were written in 1939, after the fall of the Spanish Republic, for Curt Trepte’s Swedish amateur production (Västerås, autumn 1938), which went to a youth festival in Eskilstuna in August 1939.]

  ANOTHER CASE OF APPLIED DIALECTICS

  The little play Señora Carrar’s Rifles, which B. had based on a oneacter by Synge, was being rehearsed for the Ensemble by a young director, with Carrar being played by Weigel who had played her years before in exile under B.’s direction. We had to tell B. that the ending, where the fisherman’s wife gives her young son and her brother the buried rifles, then goes off to the front with them, did not carry conviction. Weigel herself was unable to say what was wrong. As B. came in she was giving a masterly performance showing how the woman, having grown pious and embittered over the use of force, became increasingly worn down in spirit by the repeated visits and continually renewed arguments of the villagers; likewise how she collapsed when they brought in the body of her son who had been out peacefully fishing. Nonetheless B. too saw that her change of mind was not really credible. We gathered round and swapped views. ‘You could understand it if it was just the effect of all that agitation by her brother and the neighbours,’ said one of us, ‘but the death of the son is too much.’ ‘You lay too much store by agitation,’ said B., shaking his head. ‘Better if it was only the son’s death,’ said another. ‘She’d just collapse,’ said B. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Weigel eventually. ‘She suffers one blow after another, yet nobody believes they have an effect.’ ‘Just say that again,’ said B. Weigel repeated the sentence. ‘It’s that one-thing-after-another that weakens it,’ said B. We had located the flaw. Weigel had allowed Carrar to flinch under each successive blow and collapse under the heaviest one. Instead she ought to have played the way Carrar steeled herself after each blow had devastated her, then all of a sudden collapsed after the last. ‘Yes, that’s how I played it in Copenhagen,’ said Weigel, surprised, ‘and it worked there.’ ‘Curious,’ remarked B. after the rehearsal had confirmed our supposition, ‘how a fresh effort is needed every time if the laws of the dialectic are to be respected.’