The great dramatist, writer and poet Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece, Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by Stathis Livathinos, premieres on 4 December at the Main Stage of the Ziller Building. It is a fiercely anti-war play, but at the same time works as a parable, exploring the struggle to make a living, the most tragic of losses – the death of children, and the high price of profit.

Mother Courage and Her Children was written in Scandinavia in 1939. It is based on The Runagate Courage (1669), part of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s massive novel Simplicius Simplicissimus, which describes a vagabond life of trickery in times of armed conflict. Aiming to present society as capable of change, Brecht set the work during the Thirty Years’ War in Europe as a cry of anguish in response to the Nazi invasion of Poland and the impending outbreak of hostilities across the continent. Despite its obvious opposition to war and clear message about the evils of capitalism, Roland Barthes enthusiastically remarked at its premiere in Paris, “Brecht’s work avoids sermonising, which makes it all the more powerful!”

The play follows the enterprising Anna Fierling, known on the battlefield as Mother Courage, in her fight for survival. An unprincipled pedlar, she sells goods to soldiers, while trying in vain to protect her three children from the chaos of conflict: her elder son Eilif, her younger, “Swiss Cheese”, and her mute daughter Kattrin. For this resourceful woman, financial gain will always come before her family’s happiness, costing her not only the lives of her offspring, but also the values they embody: courage, honesty, and sincerity. In times of war, every concept of morality and justice is violated. Or maybe not only then?

This is Stathis Livathinos’s debut as a director on the Main Stage of the NTG, and also the first time he has tackled Brecht. The music and songs performed in Mother Courage are not by Paul Dessau, but are original compositions by Livathinos’s frequent collaborator, Thodoris Abazis, while the company is made up of a host of – mainly young – talented actors.

About Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a German poet, playwright and director, as well as a major theatrical reformer. His works reflect his anti-militaristic and Marxist beliefs, and are influenced by Chinese and Russian theatre, as well as Frank Wedekind and Erwin Piscator. During the rise of Nazism, he lived in self-exile in various European countries and in America. There he worked with acclaimed artists, but Hollywood never accepted him. In 1949, after his return to Germany, he and his second wife, Helene Weigel, founded the Berliner Ensemble, one of the world’s most important theatre companies. He developed his own form of epic theatre, in which audiences are intentionally distanced from the characters and the events of a play by various techniques, so that the performance is not an illusion of reality or just a means of triggering emotion, but an occasion for reflection and critical thinking. He died at the age of 58 from a heart attack, leaving an enormous legacy to the theatre of the 20^th century.