Eilif does a sword dance and his mother answers with a song. Eilif does his sword dance front stage near the partition between tent and kitchen. Mother Courage creeps up to the partition to finish the song. Then she goes back to her tub but remains standing.
Eilif hugs his mother and gets a slap in the face for putting himself in danger with his heroism.
The capon deal
The bargaining over the capon between Courage and the cook served among other things to establish the beginning of their tender relationship. Both showed pleasure in the bargaining, and the cook expressed his admiration not only for her ready tongue but also for the shrewdness with which she exploited the honouring of her son for business purposes. Courage in turn was amused at the way the cook fished the chunk of rotten beef out of the garbage barrel with the tip of his long meat knife and carried it, carefully as though it were a precious object – though to be kept at a safe distance from one’s nose – over to his kitchen table. The actor Bildt played the scene brilliantly, making the cook, a Don Juan fired by budding passion, prepare the capon with theatrical elegance. This dumb show, it should be observed, was performed with restraint, so that it did not distract from the scene in the tent.
Bildt even took the trouble to acquire a Dutch accent with the help of a Dutchman.
[…]
The general
The general was made into something of a cliché. Too much gruff bluster, and the peformance showed too little about the ruling class. It would have been better to make him an effete Swedish aristocrat, who honours the brave soldier as a matter of routine action, almost absently. If this had been done, his very entrance – he is drunk, supports himself on the guest of honour, and heads straight for the wine jug – would have been more instructive. As it was, one saw little more than rowdy drunkenness.
[…]
The war of religion
The general’s treatment of the chaplain is meant to show the role of religion in a war of religion. This was played rather crudely. The general has him bring the burning spill for his pipe and contemptuously pours wine over his coat; with his eyes on Eilif, the chaplain wipes the hem of his cassock, half protesting, half taking it as a joke. He is not invited to sit down to table like the young murderer, nor is he given anything to drink. But what shows his position most clearly is the undignified way, resulting from the indignity of his position, with which he sits down at table and pours himself wine when the general leads the young soldier, in whose presence all this is enacted, to the map on the tent wall, thereby leaving the table unoccupied. This position is the source of the chaplain’s cynicism.
Eilif’s dance
The brave son’s short sword dance must be executed with passion as well as ease. The young man is imitating a dance he has seen somewhere. It is not easy to make such things evident.
Costume: Eilif has a cheap, dented breastplate and is still wearing his frayed trousers. Not until scene 8 (the outbreak of peace) does he wear expensive clothing and gear; he dies rich.
A detail
During her angry speech about rotten generals Courage plucks her capon violently, giving the plucking a kind of symbolic significance. Brief bursts of laughter from the amused cook interrupt her blasphemies.
[…]
3
Mother Courage switches from the Lutheran to the Catholic camp and loses her honest son Swiss Cheese
Black-marketing in ammunition. Mother Courage serves a camp whore and warns her daughter not to take up with soldiers. While Courage flirts with the cook and the chaplain, dumb Kattrin tries on the whore’s hat and shoes. Surprise attack. First meal in the Catholic camp. Conversation between brother and sister and arrest of Siviss Cheese. Mother Courage mortgages her cart to the camp whore in order to ransom Swiss Cheese. Courage haggles over the amount of the bribe. She haggles too long and hears the volley that lays Swiss Cheese low. Dumb Kattrin stands beside her mother to wait for the dead Swiss Cheese. For fear of giving herself away, Courage denies her dead son.
Overall arrangement
During the whole scene the cart stands left with its shaft pointed towards the audience, so that those to the left of it are not seen by those on the right. Centre rear there is a flagpole, right front a barrel serving as a dining table. The scene is divided into four parts: The surprise attack, The arrest of the honest son, The bargaining, The denial. After the first two parts the half-curtain is drawn; after the third part the stage is darkened.
Black-marketing in ammunition. Mother Courage enters from the left, followed by an ordnance officer who is trying to talk her into something. For a moment she stands front stage with him; after ‘Not at that price’, she turns away from him and sits down on a box near the cart, where Swiss Cheese is already sitting. The business is conducted in an undertone. Kattrin is called away from taking down the washing and goes behind the cart left with the ordnance officer. Courage has started mending Swiss Cheese’s pants; while working, she admonishes him to be honest. Returning from the other side of the cart, the ordnance officer takes him away with him. This and the following scenes have the tone of an idyll.
Mother Courage serves a camp whore and warns her daughter not to take up with soldiers. Taking her sewing, Courage sits down with the Pottier woman. Kattrin listens to their conversation as she takes the washing off the line. After her song, Pottier, with a conspicuously whorish gait, goes behind the cart.
While Courage flirts with the cook and the chaplain, dumb Kattrin tries on the whore’s hat and shoes. After some brief banter, Mother Courage leads her guests behind the cart for a glass of wine and they strike up a political conversation. After the inserted sentence ‘This is a war of faith’, the cook ironically starts singing the hymn ‘A stronghold sure’. This gives Kattrin time to try on Yvette’s hat and shoes.
Surprise attack. The fixed point amid all the running and shouting of the surprise attack is the chaplain, who stands still and gets in everybody’s way. The rest of the arrangement follows from the printed text.
First meal in the Catholic camp. The chaplain, now Mother Courage’s potboy, joins the little family around the cooking pot; Swiss Cheese keeps slightly to one side; he wants to get away.
Conversation between brother and sister and arrest of Swiss Cheese. The conversation between brother and sister takes place at the improvised dining table. When Kattrin sees the spy behind the cart, she tries to stop her brother from climbing into it. When Courage comes back with the chaplain, Kattrin runs towards her as far as the centre of the stage. Courage, the chaplain and Kattrin group themselves around the table, waiting for the Catholics.
Mother Courage tries to mortgage her wagon to the camp whore in order to ransom Swiss Cheese. The chaplain runs to meet Courage; she is exhausted and he catches her in his arms in front of the cart. She quickly frees herself from his embrace, which has restored her strength a little, and starts thinking. Her plan is all ready when Pottier comes along with the colonel. Pottier leaves the colonel standing there, runs over to Courage, gives her the kiss of Judas, runs back to her cavalier, and then crawls avidly into the cart. Courage pulls her out, curses her, and sends her off with a push to negotiate over Swiss Cheese.
Mother Courage haggles over the amount of the bribe. Courage has set Kattrin and the chaplain to washing glasses and scouring knives, thus creating a certain atmosphere of siege. Standing centre stage between her family and the whore, she refuses to give up her cart entirely – she has fought too hard for it. She sits down again to scour knives and does not stand up when Pottier comes back with the news that the soldiers are asking two hundred florins. Now she is willing to pay.
Mother Courage hears the volley that lays Swiss Cheese low. No sooner has Courage sent Pottier away than she suddenly stands up and says: ‘I think I bargained too long.’ The volley rings out, the chaplain leaves her and goes behind the wagon. It grows dark.
For fear of giving herself away, Courage denies her dead son. Yvette walks slowly out from behind the wag
on. She scolds Courage, warns her not to give herself away, and brings Kattrin out from behind the wagon. Her face averted, Kattrin goes to her mother and stands behind her. Swiss Cheese is brought in. His mother goes over to him and denies him.
Movements and groupings
The arrangement of the movements and groupings must follow the rhythm of the story and give pictorial expression to the action. In scene 3 a camp idyll is disrupted by the enemy’s surprise attack. The idyll should be composed from the start in such a way as to make it possible to show a maximum of disruption. It must leave room for people to run to and fro in clearly laid-out confusion; the parts of the stage must be able to change their functions.
At the beginning of the scene Kattrin is hanging out washing on a clothes-line stretched between the cart and the cannon right rear so that Courage can hurriedly take it down at the end of the scene. In order to rescue her washing, Courage must go diagonally right across the stage. Kattrin sits huddled by the barrel right front, where at the beginning Yvette was being served as a customer; Courage takes soot from the cart and brings it to the barrel to rub on her daughter’s face. The same place which up until then had been devoted exclusively to business is now the scene of a private incident. Carrying the cash-box, Swiss Cheese enters diagonally from right rear to the cart left front in such a way that his path crosses that of Courage hurrying to her daughter. First she runs a few steps past him, but she has seen the cash box and turns round towards him just as he is about to enter the cart. She stands for a moment like a hen between two endangered chicks, undecided which to save first. While she is smearing her daughter’s face, her son hides the cash box in the cart; she cannot reprove him until she has finished with her daughter and comes back out of the cart. She is still standing beside him when the chaplain rushes out from behind the cart and points to the Swedish flag. Courage runs to it centre rear and takes it down.
The camp idyll that is disrupted by the attack must be divided into distinct parts. After the shady little deal in black-market ammunition has been completed by the cart steps, Swiss Cheese followed by the ordnance officer goes out right. The ordnance officer recognises the camp whore who is sitting by the barrel, sewing her hat; he looks away in disgust. Yvette shouts something after him, and then, when the centre of gravity has shifted to the right side of the stage, Courage also comes slowly over to the barrel. (A little later Kattrin follows, coming out from behind the cart and starting once more to hang up the washing.) The two women talk and Kattrin listens as she hangs up the washing. Yvette sings her song. With a provocative gait, she goes out from right front to left rear. Kattrin watches her and is admonished by her mother. The cook and the chaplain come in from the right rear. After a brief bit of banter during which they attract the attention of the audience to Kattrin by the attention they pay to her, Mother Courage leads them behind the wagon. The political discussion and Kattrin’s pantomine follow. She imitates Yvette, walking over the same ground. The alarm begins with the ordnance officer and soldiers running in from right rear. The cook goes out in that direction after Courage has run to the cannon to rescue her washing and Kattrin to the barrel to hide her feet.
Important
Courage’s unflagging readiness to work is important. She is hardly ever seen not working. It is her energy and competence that make her lack of success so shattering.
A tiny scene
The tiny scene at the beginning of 3, in which army property is black-marketed, shows the general and matter-of-fact corruption in army camps during the great war of religion. The honest son listens with half an ear, as to something quite usual, his mother does not conceal the crooked business from him, but admonishes him to be honest because he is not bright. His heeding of this advice is going to cost him his life.
Yvette Pottier
Kattrin has the example of Yvette before her. She herself must work hard; the whore drinks and lolls about. For Kattrin too the only form of love available in the midst of the war would be prostitution. Yvette sings a song showing that other forms of love lead to grave trouble. At times the whore becomes powerful by selling herself at a high price. Mother Courage, who only sells boots, must struggle desperately to defend her cart against her. Mother Courage of course makes no moral condemnation of Yvette and her special type of business.
The colonel
The colonel whom Yvette lugs in to buy Courage’s cart for her is difficult to play, because he is a purely negative quantity. His only function is to show the price the whore must pay for her rise in life; consequently he must be repellent. [Georg-Peter] Pilz portrayed the aged colonel subtly, making him mime an ardent passion of which he was not for one moment capable. The old man’s lechery erupted as though in response to a cue, and he seemed to forget his surroundings. An instant later he forgot his lechery and stared absently into the void. The actor produced a striking effect with his stick. In his passionate moments he pressed it to the ground so hard that it bent; an instant later it snapped straight – this suggested loathsome aggressive impotence and produced an irresistibly comic effect. Considerable elegance is required to keep such a performance within the bounds of good taste.
A detail
Having finished hanging up the washing, Kattrin stares open-mouthed at the visitors from the general’s tent. The cook honours her with special attention as he follows Courage behind the cart. This is probably what gives her the idea of stealing Yvette’s weapons.
The two sides
While on one side of the cart the war is being discussed with frank mockery, Kattrin is appropriating some of the tools of the whore’s trade and practising Yvette’s swaying gait, which she has just seen. Here [Angelika] Hurwicz’s facial expression was strained and deeply serious.
‘A stronghold sure’
The first part of Kattrin’s pantomime occurs after ‘I wasn’t mistaken in your face.’ (The cook added: ‘This is a war of faith.’) At this point Courage, the cook and the chaplain placed themselves to one side of the cart in such a way that they could not see Kattrin, and struck up ‘A stronghold sure’. They sang it with feeling, casting anxious glances around them as though such a song were illegal in the Swedish camp.
The surprise attack
It must be brought out that Courage is used to such surprises and knows how to handle them. Before she thinks about saving the cannon, she rescues her washing. She helps the chaplain to disguise himself, she smears her daughter’s face, she tells her son to throw the cash box away, she takes down the Swedish flag. All this she does as a matter of routine, but by no means calmly.
[…]
The meal
Courage has prepared it. Enlarged by the new employee who was a chaplain only that morning, the little family still seem somewhat flurried; in talking they look around like prisoners, but the mother is making jokes again; the Catholics, she says, need trousers as much as the Protestants. They have not learned that honesty is just as mortally dangerous among Catholics as among Lutherans.
The chaplain
The chaplain has found a refuge. He has his own bowl to eat from and he makes himself awkwardly useful, hauls buckets of water, scours knives, and so on. Otherwise he is still an outsider. For this reason or because of his phlegmatic disposition he shows no exaggerated involvement in the tragedy of the honest son. While Courage is engaged in her unduly prolonged bargaining, he looks upon her simply as his source of support.
Swiss Cheese
It seems to be hard for an actor to repress his pity for the character he is playing and not to reveal his knowledge of his impending death. In speaking to his sister Swiss Cheese shows no forebodings; this is what makes him so moving when he is taken.
Brother and sister
The short conversation between dumb Kattrin and Swiss Cheese is quiet and not without tenderness. Shortly before the destruction we are shown for the last time what is to be destroyed.
The scene goes back to an old Japanese play in which two boys conclude a friendship pact. Their way
of doing this is that one shows the other a flying bird, while the second shows the first a cloud.
A detail
Kattrin gesticulates too wildly in telling her mother about the arrest of Swiss Cheese. Consequently Courage does not understand her and says: ‘Use your hands, I don’t like it when you howl like a dog, what’ll his reverence say? Makes him uncomfortable.’ Hurwicz made Kattrin pull herself together and nod She understands this argument, it is a strong one.
A detail
While the sergeant was questioning her in the presence of Swiss Cheese, Courage rummaged in a basket – a busy business woman with no time for formalities. But after the sentence: ‘And don’t you twist his shoulder’ she ran after the soldiers who were leading him away.
Yvette’s three trips
Yvette runs back and forth three times for the sake of Courage’s son and her cart. Her anger changes from mere anger at Courage’s attempt to swindle her by paying her out of the regimental cash box to anger at Courage’s betrayal of her son.
Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) Page 36
