Mother Courage and Her Children

Olympia Theatre
June 8 - 30

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Bertolt Brecht

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    Joe O’Byrne’s adaptation of one of the twentieth century’s most important theatrical works is a brave experiment in translation. As Antony Tatlow remarks in the program "The test of a great play is not what it can tell you about the past, but what we can do with it on the stage today." Agreed. The current touring production of The Merry Wives is a classic example of how a text which is hundreds of years old and mired in contexts and histories all of its own can still work perfectly well. O’Byrne has transposed the setting of Brecht’s modernist, anti-war play (originally set in 17th century Sweden during the Thirty Years War) to Northern Ireland between 1970 and 1996.
    Brecht wrote the play in direct response to the escalating conflict in Europe in 1938-39, and it emerged as one of the most significant artistic works inspired by that period in twentieth century history. It is a damning portrait of materialism, where commerce is equated with violence and opportunism makes a mockery of ideology. In the war-torn world of the play, only the scavengers survive; by picking on the literal and metaphorical bones of those who fight (and die) in the name of causes labeled as religious or political.
    The central character is an ambiguous figure. She is sympathetic insofar as the situation is not one of her making and any choices or sacrifices she is shown to make seem as much in the name of survival as profit. Yet she is blind to all but the dubious necessity to buy and sell as human lives disintegrate around her: a war profiteer whose devotion to commerce costs her each of her three children as the play progresses. While damned in our eyes almost from her first appearance as a type of gypsy trader/fortune-teller, there is something admirable about her resilience which is difficult to completely condemn under the circumstances. As the character of the Chaplain informs us at one point, war itself will never stop: it feeds on human selfishness, which will never go away. Her evident love for her children makes her sympathetic too, but of course the paradox is that each of them dies because she is wrapped up in business wrangling of one kind or another.
    On paper it must have seemed a good idea to take the rich tapestry of theme and trope woven by Brecht through 17th century Sweden onto modern Northern Ireland. There are certainly superficial similarities in that the belligerents in both cases were Protestant and Catholic troops and that the tag ‘religious war’ was bandied about to cover up the root causes of the conflict for many years. There is certainly a point to be made about how the paramilitary activity in the North fed upon and bred the misery of a generation, and about the profiteers who rose in stature because of it.
    But the transposition is not entirely comfortable. For a start, the Northern Ireland conflict was never quite as fully-blown a war as the Thirty Years War, thus making the references to armies, commanders, military maneuvers, and the ravaging of villages a little bit awkward. While we must acknowledge the playwright’s right to poetic license (Tatlow warns us that "sympathetic interpretation must always be performative; it must change, adapt, reread."), this never feels like a wholly appropriate adaptation of setting. A paramilitary conflict has a different complexion from an all-out war, and Brecht was not concerned with the intricacies of the former. O’Byrne does not adapt the text sufficiently to account for the differences, so the audience is asked to simply accept the conceit and approach the play as a text without concern for realism. There is also a problem in that while for Brecht the Thirty Years War was an allegory for WWII, O’Byrne has gone straight to the source of conflict in a way which makes it like adapting The Crucible to a 1950s HUAC setting instead of 16th century Salem.
    Ignoring realism is a problem on another level, too. Tatlow rightly points out that "an inhibitor to performing Brecht often results from too much respect for the theoretical baggage that accompanies the notion of Brechtian theatre," but there is such a notion and it does weigh heavily upon this play. The work encourages the audience to respond to disruptions and apparent variances from theatrical norms so that they will not be caught up in the narrative. The point of it all is to focus attention on the meaning and engage the audience on a political level. This typifies a type of avant-garde modernist agit-prop which was very effective in its day, but has now long lost resonance other than as a bit of art history. These effects are nonetheless written in to the text, and no amount of restaging or rereading will remove them.
    The characterization is still deliberately non-empathic. The principals are clearly vehicles for thought rather than living, breathing beings. They mouth speeches which directly address the audience with anticapitalist and antiwar statements, and the plot is little more than a series of situations wherein ideologies are pilloried with left-wing aesthetic and political ideals. The songs which punctuate the action are probably the most visible examples of the type of distancing devices used. These are not intended to be toe-tapping entertainments to paper over holes in the story. They stand out precisely because they are laden with rhetoric both in themselves and because they break up the narrative and disengage the spectator from the comfort zone of viewing conventional realist theatre. But when the realism itself is suspect or faulty on a level other than that required by the author, the aesthetic superstructure collapses and the effect is destroyed.
    Further transcription problems arise with Mother Courage herself (portrayed by Tony-winning actor Tyne Daly, making her European stage debut). She is likened here to an Irish Traveller (a nomadic but not ethnic community peculiar to Ireland and not related to the Romany gypsies upon whom the iconography of Mother Courage was most clearly based). Lacking a Romany culture, or even any other kind of opportunistic wanderer who might roam the roads of Ireland to work with, the Irish Traveller is slotted into this place in the thematic mix. This brings with it all kinds of complications. The fact that Daly’s accent roams all over the country and sometimes across the Atlantic is merely a final nail in the coffin of characterization, as it makes it almost impossible to ascertain just where distanciation ends and thespian vagaries begin.
    This was an ambitious project (the dream child of the late Agnes Bernelle) and it is a well designed and respectfully performed production. Daly is actually quite good in the lead (accent troubles aside), commanding the stage without dominating it. The ensemble acting is generally effective, but it certainly does show the rhetorical seams in Brecht’s text very clearly. This is not contemporary theatre: it is a stylized, highly politicized and aestheticism modernist trope in which actors are not free to create and interpret in the same way as they would in an ‘ordinary’ play. The weight of theatrical history bears even heavier upon them than history itself bears upon the text on the whole and the result is neither Brecht nor O’Byrne.
    In a sense, despite Tatlow’s reservations, a museum-piece ‘faithful’ rendering of the play might well have been more effective. Though it is impossible to reproduce the original meaning and context, this adaptation has not succeeded in making the text work for today. Its transpositions simply add greater levels of thematic and referential complexity. O’Byrne tries to shift the play into the post-modern while Brecht continually drags it back to the latter days of modernism. The result is more frustrating than thought-provoking and though, like its central character, one would like to feel sympathy for it, this isn’t always possible.