“War never ends, it becomes a habit and over time everyone gets used to it. You sleep in the sun, you earn money, you do business, you gain status,” a soldier tells Anna Fierling at the end of the play. The dismay and indifference of this sentence is total. Almost Kafkaesque in its simplicity. It has always been like this. The hunt for primitive man gave way to war, Pascal Quignard would say. The death drive leads all humans to self-destruction, Freud would say. Brecht is more direct: “War never ends, there are only intervals.” This is the great idea that runs through Mother Couragethe great epic of 20th century theatre, a work that time gave the status of a classic, and the world in 2024 gave it the status of “urgent”.
Written in 1939, in the face of the advance of Nazism, the story of this mother who sells her children to survive reinvented the theatre as a place of pedagogy, awareness and wonder, aimed at the masses and not at the educated elites. To celebrate its 20 years of existence, the Teatro do Bairro returns with this play that celebrated actresses such as Anna Shygulla, Liv Ullman, Diana Rigg, Meryl Streep, Eunice Muñoz, Teresa Gafeira and now Maria João Luís. A role that only great actresses can carry.
After four sold-out sessions, two at the CCB and two at the Almada Theatre Festival, Mother Courage and her childrenin its original title, opens this Wednesday in the ruins of the Convento do Carmo in Lisbon, where it will remain until August 17. This is only the third time that the play has been presented in Portugal and director António Pires wanted to accentuate the “timeless” character of the text, with a refined dramaturgy, eliminating many typical elements of Brechtian theatre and opting for a setting that evokes the works of Aldo Rossi, the “architect of melancholy”, also exchanging songs by Paul Dassau for poems by José Saramago, spoken by the 20 members of the participatory choir. Translated by Ilse Llosa as Mother CourageIt is not presented as “ideological” theatre, but as a manifestation of desperation “against the trivialisation of images of war promoted by television, which can only make us apathetic to the suffering of others and lead to the normalisation of war”, says António Pires, himself a refugee from the Angolan civil war.
Anna Fierling has three children at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated Central Europe in the 17th century and was one of the deadliest in the bloody history of our continent. Brecht was inspired by the play “Vagabunda Coragem” by the writer Hans Jakob Grimmelshausen (1621-1676), who lived through that war. She is a survivor of poverty, she carries her children and a cart, she sells wine, rags, contraband, she sells anything. She will also sell her two sons to the war. Only Kattrin, her mute daughter, remains with her, who helps her with the cart. For two hours we follow her passing between the living and the dead, she is “a hyena” as Brecht would say, who invented her as an example of the lack of scruples and morals of those who benefit from war, but who, ambiguously, also gave her a humanity that makes the public, almost a century and many wars later, identify and be moved by this tough woman.
“She is the mother. And as such, she has always been the giver of life and death. She carries her children, both living and dead. But it is also a fact that women are the main victims of war,” says António Pires, reflecting on the fact that war is the territory par excellence of men. In this work, the characters who carry the story are women: Anna Fierling, Kattrin, the mute girl, and the prostitute Yvette Pointier.
The play, which premiered in Zurich in 1941, starred Helene Wiegel, Bertolt Brecht’s wife and artistic partner, and is one of the milestones of modernist theatre, in which the writer uses the montage method used in cinema, breaking the so-called “third curtain”, where the actor addresses the audience, integrating them into the story, and the heroes are the antithesis of the heroes of Greek theatre, they are morally inferior, without ethics and without a future. It is, therefore, a call to attention about war as a business in which manipulated and uncritical people allow themselves to be trapped. Brecht wants the spectators to build an objective and cold view of reality and António Pires wants “people to watch less television and go to the theatre more”, a place “where they can build their own mental images, understand the complexity of events in order to be able to We are not just consumers of images”. For this reason, he continues, “at the Teatro do Bairro we have focused on classic texts, without adaptations, cuts, adjustments. The public has to mature”.
Thus, this narrative, which spans 12 years of war in 12 short scenes, has a social “type” in each character: the general, the soldiers, the chaplain, the cook, Anna’s children, Eilif, the typical “smart boy” who is a hero in war and will be seen as a traitor in peace; Swiss Cheese, the youngest son, who steals the safe of his regiment; Yvette, the prostitute who marries a general and becomes a rich widow; the obedient and cowardly peasants, devastated like dogs by any power; and Kattrin, the mute girl, who grows up during the war and only wants to be beautiful and find a boyfriend. After Courage, Kattrin is the most important character; she, mute, also represents the pantomime and silent film, which Brecht loved, within the spoken theatre. Being the bravest, she will also be the only one to die for the others, after being disfigured in an attack.
Maria João Luís, always on stage, for more than two hours, with a text of great complexity and a role full of ambiguities, resonances, metalanguage, feelings, which force us to look at the conflicts that surround us, in Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, Rwanda, Congo, which reinforce the feeling that war is approaching again. António Pires, who says he began preparing this piece in 2020, which at the time seemed somewhat old-fashioned, this year saw it become “a terrifying warning”.
“Mãe Coragem” will be at the Ruins of the Convento do Carmo, in Lisbon, from June 24 to August 17. Performances take place from Monday to Saturday at 9:30 p.m. The play lasts approximately two hours and fifteen minutes and is subtitled in English.
Source: Observadora
