Think of a play that might be perfect material for director Gerry Mulgrew, and Bertolt Brechtt’s Mother Courage And her Children would be right up there as a front-runner. As one of the co-founders of Communicado Theatre Company in the early 1980s, Mulgrew was one of the first contemporary directors in Scotland to absorb an explicitly European way of theatre-making into his practice. Taking plays that were epic in scope and scale, and often rooted in the classics if not produced directly from them, Mulgrew’s raison d’etre became ensemble-based, with large casts augmented by live musicians, whose soundtracks became integral to the productions’ strolling player style.
Mother Courage And Her Children, then, sits easily alongside Mulgrew’s heady takes on Cyrano De Bergerac, Nicolai Erdman’s The Suicide and his more recent look at Robin Jenkins’ novel, Fergus Lamont. The only question regarding Brecht’s great anti-war play, then, is just why it’s taken Mulgrew so long to get round to it.
“I’ve always wanted to do it,” he confesses. “For twenty-five years I’ve wanted to do it, but it was never really possible with Communicado because it was too expensive, and I wanted to do it in as big a way as possible. But, as well as being a great play, it’s a great play which, unfortunately, is always relevant. It’s one of the great anti-war plays of our time, which could relate to Bosnia in the 1990s and relates to things that are going on now, but it’s not just waving placards around in some polemical kind of way. It looks at the contradictions of war, and how it’s the people who have no power who suffer the most. Unfortunately it has to be said again and again that war isn’t fun. It’s not just jingoism. It’s the poor people who pay the price of those in power making the same mistakes again and again.”
In Mother Courage herself, Brecht has provided us with one of the greatest female roles in drama, who personifies the contradictions Mulgrew talks about. In turns survivor, opportunist and grieving parent, Mother Courage’s story is “a terrible tragedy” according to Mulgrew. “She’s this incredible life force, who survives, but survives alone. It could be argued that she had no choice in the decisions she took, but at the end her survival is a pyrrhic victory.”
Such a mighty role requires nerves of steel. Mulgrew has cast long-term member of Dundee Rep’s ensemble company, Ann Louise Ross, who so brilliantly rook on a similarly towering role in Howard Barker’s Scenes From An Execution on the Dundee stage.
“It’s a difficult role for any actor,” Mulgrew points out, “because Mother Courage isn’t always likeable. In a way she beings about the deaths of her own children, and at the end of the day you can dislike her and be full of admiration, because she survives, but she’s harsh. There’s not a lot of time for gentleness and kindness.”
With such a meaty lead role, the production history of Mother Courage has frequently been a vehicle for star turns. Brecht himself cast Therese Giehse for the play’s 1941 Zurich debut, with Giehse returning to the role in 1950 for Brecht’s third look at the play in Munich. Thos followed the previous year’s East Berlin production starring his second wife, Helene Weigel. At that time Brecht couldn’t have envisaged Meryl Streep playing it for free in New York’s Central Park as she did in 2006, but the populist in him will undoubtedly have adored such a subversive sleight-of-hand.
In Britain, one of the most recent grand dames to take on the role was Diana Rigg at the Royal National Theatre in 1995, while in 2000, Shared Experience cast the great actress who cut her teeth with Theatre de Complicitie, Kathryn Hunter. Mother Courage And Her Children had made its UK debut in 1955 in a production by Joan Littlewood’s radical Theatre Workshop company in London. Fittingly for such a powerful theatrical matriarch, Littlewood herself took the title role.
Closer to home, probably the most celebrated productions of recent times was Philip Prowse’s at The Citizens Theatre as part of Glasgow’s City Of Culture programme in 1990. This featured Glenda Jackson in the title role, one of her last stage outings prior to becoming a Labour MP.
Ian Woodridge directed Mother Courage twice during his time in Scotland, both in his tenure as artistic director of TAG in 1984, then a few years later when he was in charge of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre. Kenny Ireland too put his considerable directorial weight behind his own production almost a decade later on the same stage during his reign there.
One of the most frequently problematic things about revisiting Brecht over the years has been its playing style. Too often directors and actors have become hung up on the so-called ‘alienation’ effect, whereby audiences are frequently reminded they are watching a play rather than be allowed to lose themselves in the emotions of the occasion.
“Well, I’m not,” Mulgrew says bluntly of any fears of being overly deferent to Brecht’s philosophy. “Largely because I don’t really know what it is. Alienation is one of those words that always comes up, but I’m not sure it really means anything anymore. When Brecht did it, Mother Courage was quite a shocking and revolutionary piece of theatre, but in the intervening years his ideas have been absorbed into the theatrical bloodstream. To hold up a placard announcing the next scene isn’t as revolutionary today as it was in 1941, and it never will be. My approach is to start at the beginning, you find out what’s going on, and you get to the end. What comes up comes up, without any fear of ideas.”
The most recent Mother Courage to grace Scottish stages was in 2006, an underwhelming affair produced by the Edinburgh-based Benchtours company. As fate would have it, once Mulgrew has set Mother Courage’s cart in motion in Dundee, he’ll be taking charge of another classic play with Benchtours themselves. Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist chamber piece, The Lesson, may be on the face of it a whole lot smaller in scope than Mother Courage, but it has its own set of theatrical demands that are equally as rigorous. However The Lesson turns out, it’s Mother Courage which will inevitably seem more relevant.
“I remember the march in Glasgow against Iraq,” Mulgrew says. “There were many people with placards saying the war was wrong, but somehow that’s not enough. There has to be something more than that. There’s a scene in Mother Courage when she tells a soldier that his anger’s a short anger that relates to his own reward. She tells him his anger’s not long enough. That’s something we need today as well. Protesting against the war, and protesting against the powers that be who say that they can’t stop the war because it would be disrespectful to our boys is really important, but there has to be something more than that. Being aware of the injustices and being angry about it is a start, but we need to take it further.”
Mother Courage And Her Children, Dundee Rep, until September 27
www.dundeerep.co.uk
The Lesson, Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, October 4, then tours
www.benchtours.com
The Herald, September 9th 2008
ends
Mother Courage And Her Children, then, sits easily alongside Mulgrew’s heady takes on Cyrano De Bergerac, Nicolai Erdman’s The Suicide and his more recent look at Robin Jenkins’ novel, Fergus Lamont. The only question regarding Brecht’s great anti-war play, then, is just why it’s taken Mulgrew so long to get round to it.
“I’ve always wanted to do it,” he confesses. “For twenty-five years I’ve wanted to do it, but it was never really possible with Communicado because it was too expensive, and I wanted to do it in as big a way as possible. But, as well as being a great play, it’s a great play which, unfortunately, is always relevant. It’s one of the great anti-war plays of our time, which could relate to Bosnia in the 1990s and relates to things that are going on now, but it’s not just waving placards around in some polemical kind of way. It looks at the contradictions of war, and how it’s the people who have no power who suffer the most. Unfortunately it has to be said again and again that war isn’t fun. It’s not just jingoism. It’s the poor people who pay the price of those in power making the same mistakes again and again.”
In Mother Courage herself, Brecht has provided us with one of the greatest female roles in drama, who personifies the contradictions Mulgrew talks about. In turns survivor, opportunist and grieving parent, Mother Courage’s story is “a terrible tragedy” according to Mulgrew. “She’s this incredible life force, who survives, but survives alone. It could be argued that she had no choice in the decisions she took, but at the end her survival is a pyrrhic victory.”
Such a mighty role requires nerves of steel. Mulgrew has cast long-term member of Dundee Rep’s ensemble company, Ann Louise Ross, who so brilliantly rook on a similarly towering role in Howard Barker’s Scenes From An Execution on the Dundee stage.
“It’s a difficult role for any actor,” Mulgrew points out, “because Mother Courage isn’t always likeable. In a way she beings about the deaths of her own children, and at the end of the day you can dislike her and be full of admiration, because she survives, but she’s harsh. There’s not a lot of time for gentleness and kindness.”
With such a meaty lead role, the production history of Mother Courage has frequently been a vehicle for star turns. Brecht himself cast Therese Giehse for the play’s 1941 Zurich debut, with Giehse returning to the role in 1950 for Brecht’s third look at the play in Munich. Thos followed the previous year’s East Berlin production starring his second wife, Helene Weigel. At that time Brecht couldn’t have envisaged Meryl Streep playing it for free in New York’s Central Park as she did in 2006, but the populist in him will undoubtedly have adored such a subversive sleight-of-hand.
In Britain, one of the most recent grand dames to take on the role was Diana Rigg at the Royal National Theatre in 1995, while in 2000, Shared Experience cast the great actress who cut her teeth with Theatre de Complicitie, Kathryn Hunter. Mother Courage And Her Children had made its UK debut in 1955 in a production by Joan Littlewood’s radical Theatre Workshop company in London. Fittingly for such a powerful theatrical matriarch, Littlewood herself took the title role.
Closer to home, probably the most celebrated productions of recent times was Philip Prowse’s at The Citizens Theatre as part of Glasgow’s City Of Culture programme in 1990. This featured Glenda Jackson in the title role, one of her last stage outings prior to becoming a Labour MP.
Ian Woodridge directed Mother Courage twice during his time in Scotland, both in his tenure as artistic director of TAG in 1984, then a few years later when he was in charge of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre. Kenny Ireland too put his considerable directorial weight behind his own production almost a decade later on the same stage during his reign there.
One of the most frequently problematic things about revisiting Brecht over the years has been its playing style. Too often directors and actors have become hung up on the so-called ‘alienation’ effect, whereby audiences are frequently reminded they are watching a play rather than be allowed to lose themselves in the emotions of the occasion.
“Well, I’m not,” Mulgrew says bluntly of any fears of being overly deferent to Brecht’s philosophy. “Largely because I don’t really know what it is. Alienation is one of those words that always comes up, but I’m not sure it really means anything anymore. When Brecht did it, Mother Courage was quite a shocking and revolutionary piece of theatre, but in the intervening years his ideas have been absorbed into the theatrical bloodstream. To hold up a placard announcing the next scene isn’t as revolutionary today as it was in 1941, and it never will be. My approach is to start at the beginning, you find out what’s going on, and you get to the end. What comes up comes up, without any fear of ideas.”
The most recent Mother Courage to grace Scottish stages was in 2006, an underwhelming affair produced by the Edinburgh-based Benchtours company. As fate would have it, once Mulgrew has set Mother Courage’s cart in motion in Dundee, he’ll be taking charge of another classic play with Benchtours themselves. Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist chamber piece, The Lesson, may be on the face of it a whole lot smaller in scope than Mother Courage, but it has its own set of theatrical demands that are equally as rigorous. However The Lesson turns out, it’s Mother Courage which will inevitably seem more relevant.
“I remember the march in Glasgow against Iraq,” Mulgrew says. “There were many people with placards saying the war was wrong, but somehow that’s not enough. There has to be something more than that. There’s a scene in Mother Courage when she tells a soldier that his anger’s a short anger that relates to his own reward. She tells him his anger’s not long enough. That’s something we need today as well. Protesting against the war, and protesting against the powers that be who say that they can’t stop the war because it would be disrespectful to our boys is really important, but there has to be something more than that. Being aware of the injustices and being angry about it is a start, but we need to take it further.”
Mother Courage And Her Children, Dundee Rep, until September 27
www.dundeerep.co.uk
The Lesson, Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, October 4, then tours
www.benchtours.com
The Herald, September 9th 2008
ends
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