The Life And Works Of Bertolt Brecht Section: Theater Essays
Brecht argued that the theatre should not seek to make its audience believe in or relate to the characters on the stage, but rather make the audience realize that what it sees on stage is merely an account that should be watched with critical detachment. A Little Orangum for the Theatre, thoroughly explained Brecht's theory of "epic theatre." In 1949 Brecht went back to Berlin to stage Mother Courage and her Children, with his wife Helene Weigel, in the title part. This led to the formation of Brecht's own theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble. From that point on, Brecht devoted all his time and energy on the Ensemble and on staging his own plays. He was often criticized in Eastern Europe for being unorthodox; and was sometimes boycotted in the West for being too communistic. However, he had a great triumph at the Paris Theatre des Nations in 1955, and in the same year in Moscow he received a Stalin Peace Prize.
Unfortunately this streak of success was to be short lived. Brecht died the following year in East Berlin. Bertolt Brecht was an ingenious and skillful writer. He was a masterful poet who commanded many styles and moods. As a playwright he was a restless worker and a man in pursuit of idealistic change, by properly presenting his beliefs to the public. Bertolt Brecht was a man of rare humor, musical, and visual awareness. He did have some faults and did encounter difficulties in his life. However his strong character and intelligence helped him overcome these obstacles and become a success. He is remembered today, and will be throughout history, as one of the greatest authors of his time. Mother Courage and her Children Bertolt Brecht had two main periods of maximum creativity. The first period came at the onset of his manhood. During this time his writings were greatly influenced by the Dadaist group and by Marxism. Still though he created some of his finest poems before the age of twenty-five.
The second period came when Brecht had to somewhat abandoned his hectic political activities during the depression years, and go into a self induced exile. This is the time, which many critics believe to be, when Brecht created his greatest plays. The Good woman of Setzuan, The Life of Galileo, and the Caucasian Chalk Circle were all among them. His greatest piece of work created at this time was Mother Courage and her Children, a play that many regard as his masterpiece and finest mature creation. Mother Courage and her Children, is the story of a woman who, with her family, follows around the Thirty Years War to make a living as a peddler. The main characters of the play are Mother Courage, her daughter Kattrin, her older son Elif, her younger son Swiss Cheese, and several soldiers and officers. Mother Courage's real name was Anna Fierling, but all her children have different last names and different fathers.
They are a rag tag bunch but are making a good living following the war and being peddlers. As the play goes on things only get worse. The army becomes desperate and starts taking things from Mother Courage without paying. Her peddling wagon is robbed and she ends up losing almost everything. As the war rages on, violence, death, and destruction surround her and her children. In the end she is ruined, and yet seems to have e learned nothing new about the nature of war, from her experience. Mother courage was a very important play because it showed how peasants and lower class citizens could be used as tools for the socially elite. It exposed the commercial aspect of war, which some individuals take total advantage of. Mother Courage herself was one of these people.
It never dawns on her that one must be high up in society and wealth to make a prophet from war. She seems to think of this somewhat in the middle of the play, but stops thinking about it towards the end. However, Bertolt Brecht's main goal was not for Mother Courage to think about these topics, but for the audience watching the play to thing about them. Mother Courage and her Children succeeded in getting across the social issues that Brecht wanted to be noticed, while it used his style of "epic theatre." The Audience was never supposed to feel sympathy for Mother Courage, but to think of the reasons of why she was going through her ordeal. For these reasons Mother Courage and her Children is considered to be one of Bertolt Brecht's finest works and one of this lasts century's greatest plays.
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