Mother courage and her children script pdf

Methuen Drama Modern Classics

The Methuen Drama Modern Plays series has always been at the forefront of modern playwriting and has reflected the most exciting developments in modern drama since 1959. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Methuen Drama, the series was relaunched in 2009 as Methuen Drama Modern Classics, and continues to offer readers a choice selection of the best modern plays.

The Threepenny Opera First staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble), The Threepenny Opera was Brecht’s first and most outstanding success. Based on John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera, the play is a satire on the capitalist bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic despite its setting in a mock- Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill’s music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world. Filmed three times, it remains one of Brecht’s best loved and most performed plays.

This new translation, first staged in 1975 at York Theatre Royal and subsequently at the Adelaide Playhouse and the Lincoln Center, New York, is by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, who also include Brecht’s own notes and discarded songs as well as an extensive editorial commentary on the genesis of the play.

Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg on 10 February 1898, and died in Berlin on 14 August 1956. He grew to maturity as a playwright in the frenetic years of the twenties and early thirties, with such plays as Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny and The Mother. He left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, eventually reaching the United States in 1941, where he remained until 1947. It was during this period of exile that such masterpieces as The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Puntila were written. Shortly after his return to Europe in 1947 he founded the Berliner Ensemble, and from then until his death was mainly occupied in producing his own plays.

Other Bertolt Brecht publications by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

Brecht Collected Plays: One (Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward II of

England, A Respectable Wedding, The Beggar or the Dead Dog, Driving Out a Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch)

Brecht Collected Plays: Two (Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera,

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins)

Brecht Collected Plays: Three (Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Mother, The Exception and

the Rule, The Horations and the Curiatians, St Joan of the Stockyards)

Brecht Collected Plays: Four (Round Heads and Pointed Heads, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,

Señora Carrar’s Rifles, Dansen, How Much Is Your Iron?, The Trial of Lucullus)

Brecht Collected Plays: Five (Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children)

Brecht Collected Plays: Six (The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,

Mr Puntila and His Man Matti)

Brecht Collected Plays: Seven (The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweyk in the Second World War,

The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Duchess of Malfi)

Brecht Collected Plays: Eight (The Days of the Commune, The Antigone of Sophocles,

Turandot or the Whitewashers’ Congress)

Berliner Ensemble Adaptations – publishing 2014 (The Tutor, Coriolanus, The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen 1431,

Don Juan, Trumpets and Drums)

Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1934-55 Brecht on Art and Politics Brecht on Film and Radio

Brecht on Performance - publishing 2014 Brecht on Theatre - publishing 2014 Brecht in Practice - publishing 2014

The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre Brecht, Music and Culture - publishing 2014

Brecht in Context The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht Brecht: A Choice of Evils

Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life - publishing 2014

A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht

BERTOLT BRECHT

The Threepenny Opera translated by Ralph Manheim and John Willet

Original work entitled Die Dreigroschenoper

edited and introduced by John Willet and Ralph Manheim

Contents

Introduction THE THREEPENNY OPERA

After John Gay: The Beggar’s Opera NOTES AND VARIANTS

Texts by Brecht

Additional songs from ‘The Bruise’

Appendix

On The Threepenny Opera

Notes to The Threepenny Opera

Note by Kurt Weill

About The Threepenny Opera (a public letter)

Transcript

From a conversation between Brecht and Giorgio Strehler on 25 October 1955 with regard to the forthcoming Milan production

Editorial Notes

1. General

2. The 1928 stage script

3. From the stage script to the present text

Introduction

First staged only two years after Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera was a very different kind of achievement. For where the earlier play had its roots in Brecht’s Augsburg youth and developed under a variety of influences over many years, The Threepenny Opera – or, more precisely, Brecht’s contribution to it – was quickly written for a specific purpose. Moreover although both remained among his favourite plays he showed his affection this time not by continually revising the text as he did with Man equals Man but by leaving the original version unchanged and instead developing it first as a film story, then as a novel. What we have here therefore is the work as it was written and staged just half a century ago in 1928. Like all his plays it is something of a montage, embracing elements from different sources and periods. But far more than most of them it remains nailed to a particular moment in German history.

The second half of the 1920s was the stable period of the Weimar Republic, starting in 1924, once the effects of the inflation began to be overcome and the new American capital began flowing into the country, and ending in 1929 with the Wall Street crash. In the theatre it began with a succession of new-style productions, among which Brecht’s Edward II and Erich Engel’s Coriolanus early in 1925 were significant as leading to a general re-evaluation of the classics; but the real landmark was Carl Zuckmayer’s Der fröhliche Weinberg at the end of that year, with its revelation of the public appetite for literate but unpretentious down-to-earth comedy. Brecht at this time was trying to grapple with the problem of writing plays about the modern world, with all its economic complexities and its wide-ranging interrelationships, and this led both to a more conscious development of the ‘epic’ form and to a new fascination with the economic analysis put forward by Karl Marx, whom he started reading in 1926. It must have been this twofold interest, coupled with his growing reputation as one of the most vocal and original of the younger playwrights, that took him into the collective of ‘dramaturgs’ formed by Erwin Piscator when he set up his first independent company at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in the autumn of 1927. Though this was a Berlin West End theatre, appealing largely to a fashionable audience, its politics were Communist and its four productions established new ways of tackling just the sort of themes that had begun plaguing Brecht. None the less the particular plays which he was trying to write – notably Joe P. Fleischhacker, based on Frank Norris’s novel The Pit about the Chicago wheat market, and Decline of the Egoist Johann Fatzer about soldiers deserting in the First World War – were neither performed there nor even completed. Indeed from Man equals Man in 1926 to Saint Joan of the Stockyards in 1931 he remained unable to finish the large-scale plays that preoccupied him most.

At the same time his first meeting with Kurt Weill in the spring of 1927, soon after Weill’s enthusiastic review of the Berlin Radio broadcast of Man equals Man, gave him a new and promising line to follow. Weill, who had been one of Busoni’s handful of pupils at the Berlin Academy, was becoming known as a dissonant, strongly contrapuntal neo- classical composer to be ranked with Hindemith, Toch and Ernst Křenek, but he was also a man of considerable literary judgement who had been collaborating with two of the few

playwrights about whom Brecht had anything good to say: Georg Kaiser and Iwan Goll. Enormously impressed not only by the broadcast but also by Brecht’s first book of poems, the Devotions, Weill now wished to collaborate with him too. According to Weill’s account they had no sooner met than they started discussing the opera medium; the word ‘Mahagonny’ cropped up, and with it the notion of a ‘paradise city’. In other words, so it would appear, Brecht at the outset introduced him to that notion of a ‘Mahagonny Opera’ which he had brought with him from Munich (originally with his first wife Marianne in mind, she being an opera singer), and which related to the ‘Mahagonny Songs’ in the Devotions. The idea of turning this into a full-scale opera was thus already in the air when Weill got a commission to contribute one of a series of short operas to the forthcoming Baden-Baden ‘German Chamber Music’ festival that summer. Basing himself on the ‘Mahagonny Songs’, and making some use of Brecht’s own tunes for them, he started in May to compose the jazzy ‘songspiel’ now known as The Little Mahagonny which was performed at Baden-Baden in a boxing-ring stage in July. After this the two collaborators worked throughout the rest of the year on the libretto for the full-scale opera, which was ready for Weill to begin composing early in 1928.

In effect then it can be said that Brecht started the year of The Threepenny Opera with three main irons in the fire. There was his technically and politically stimulating job with Piscator, which was now involving him in the rewriting of the official Schweik adaptation to suit the revolutionary staging which Piscator and his designer George Grosz had devised. There were his own incomplete social-political plays, one of which – Fleischhacker – had already been announced on Piscator’s prospectus. And then there was the very promising collaboration with Weill, involving also his own preferred designer Caspar Neher (who was outside Piscator’s scheme of things). Looking now at the state of the German theatre at the time it can be seen that any reliance on Piscator involved considerable risks, for he was already far exceeding his budgeted costs and the combination of bad planning and expensive technical innovations was soon to be fatal. None the less it was Piscator who sparked off a wave of interest in the Zeitstück, or ‘play of the times’, from which a number of other left-wing writers benefited and which might well have led to a production for one of Brecht’s essays in the genre. Oddly enough, however, it was the opera medium which reflected this first, following the impact of Křenek’s jazz opera Jonny spielt auf in February (Leipzig premiere) and October (Berlin production) 1927. And with Klemperer’s appointment that year to head the Kroll-Oper, the second state opera house in Berlin, a unique centre for modern opera was created in which such associates of Brecht’s as Neher and Ernst Legal and Jacob Geis (both of whom had been involved with Man equals Man) were soon to find employment.

The critical moment came in March–April 1928, when Piscator had taken on a second theatre and was fast heading for bankruptcy. Some three months earlier a new management had been set up in Berlin, headed by a young actor called Ernst-Josef Aufricht, once a member of Berthold Viertel’s much respected company ‘Die Truppe’. Around Christmas he had been given 100,000 marks by his father with which to open his own Berlin theatre, and he used this to rent the medium-sized late nineteenth-century Theater am Schiffbauerdamm not far from Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. He booked Erich Engel, then busy with Brecht’s Man equals Man at the Volksbühne, to direct the

opening production, if possible to coincide with his own twenty-eighth birthday on 31 August. All that remained was to find a play. This was not quite so simple, even after he had brought in a young friend of Karl Kraus’s called Heinrich Fischer to help him and act as his deputy. Kraus, Wedekind, Toller, Feuchtwanger, Kaiser, even the much older Sudermann were in turn considered or actually approached, but to no effect. Then one of those happy accidents occurred which go to make theatre history: Fischer ran into Brecht in a café, introduced him to Aufricht and asked if he had anything that would answer their needs. Brecht’s own work in progress – presumably Fleischhacker – would not do; it was already promised – presumably to Piscator – and Aufricht appears to have been bored by his account of it. But Brecht also mentioned a translation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera which his collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann had begun making the previous November. This eighteenth-century satire had been an immense success in Nigel Playfair’s revival at the Lyric, Hammersmith some five or six years earlier, and to the two entrepreneurs the idea ‘smelt of theatre’. They read all that had so far been written, under the provisional title Gesindel, or Scum, and decided that this was the play with which to open.

Just how much Brecht had had to do with the script at this exploratory stage is uncertain, but he now took the lead and proposed that Weill should be brought in to write modern settings for the songs. Aufricht, by his own account, thereupon went privately to hear two of Weill’s Kaiser operas, was appalled by their atonality and told his musical director Theo Mackeben to get hold of the traditional Pepusch arrangements in case Weill came up with something impossibly rebarbative. In mid-May the whole team were packed off to Le Lavandou in the south of France to complete the work: the Brechts, the Weills, Hauptmann, Engel. Here, and subsequently on the Ammersee in Bavaria, Brecht seems to have written some brand-new scenes (the stable wedding for instance, which bears no relation to Gay’s original), and started adding his own songs, four of them piratically derived from a German version of Villon. On 1 August rehearsals started, with a duplicated script which, as our notes show, still contained a good deal of the original work, as well as songs by Gay himself and Rudyard Kipling which later disappeared. A succession of accidents, catastrophes and stopgaps then occurred. Carola Neher, who was to play Polly, arrived a fortnight late from her husband Klabund’s deathbed, and abandoned her part; Roma Bahn was recruited and learned it in four days. Feuchtwanger suggested the new title; Karl Kraus added the second verse to the Jealousy Duet. Helene Weigel, cast as Mrs Coaxer the brothel Madame, developed appendicitis and the part was cut. The cabaret singer Rosa Valetti objected to the ‘Song of Sexual Obsession’ which she had to sing as Mrs Peachum, so this too went; Käte Kühl as Lucy could not manage the florid solo which Weill had written for another actress in scene 8, so this was eliminated and later the scene itself was cut; Weill’s young wife Lotte Lenya was accidentally left off the printed programme; the play was found to be three-quarters of an hour too long, leading to massive cuts in Peachum’s part and the dropping of the ‘Solomon Song’; the finale was only written during the rehearsals; and late on the ‘Ballad of Mac the Knife’ was added as an inspired afterthought.

All accounts agree that the production’s prospects seemed extremely bad, with only Weill’s music and Caspar Neher’s sets remaining unaffected by the mounting chaos. Even the costumes were simply those available, so Brecht was to say later (p. 103), while the

Victorian setting was decided less by the needs of the story than by the shortage of time. The dress rehearsal must have been disastrous, the reactions of the first-night audience a confirmation of this, lasting right into the second scene, even after the singing of ‘Pirate Jenny’ in the stable. But with the ‘Cannon Song’ the applause suddenly burst loose. Quite unexpectedly, inspiredly, improvisedly, management and collaborators found themselves with the greatest German hit of the 1920s on their hands.

It struck Berlin during an interregnum, as it were: at a moment when Piscator had temporarily disappeared as an active force in the left-wing theatre and the various collective groups which succeeded him had not yet got off the ground. For Brecht and Weill there was now the composition of Mahagonny to be resumed – something that was only completed in November 1929 – as well as a small Berlin Requiem which Weill had agreed to write for Radio Frankfurt on texts by Brecht, and which they sketched out in November and December 1928. Both men probably also had some involvement in the production of Feuchtwanger’s second ‘Anglo-Saxon Play’ Die Petroleuminseln at the Staatstheater in the former month, for which Weill wrote the music and Neher once more provided sets. But the immediate effect of The Threepenny Opera’s success was to establish the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm as the leading left-wing theatre of the moment in Berlin. Retrospectively Brecht came to speak of it as ‘his’ theatre, and indeed to a great extent he does seem to have dominated its entire opening season. For with The Threepenny Opera temporarily transferred to another theatre (and Carola Neher at some point assuming her original role as Polly), he took over the direction of Marieluise Fleisser’s anti-militarist Bavarian farce Die Pioniere von Ingolstadt, a sequel to the play which he had recommended to the Junge Bühne three years earlier. This opened on 31 March 1929 and featured an unknown actor whom Brecht had advised Aufricht to engage on a three-year contract – Peter Lorre – along with Kurt Gerron and Lenya, the Brown and Jenny from his own play. The farce itself was too outspoken for the police and the military, and had to be bowdlerised, but it none the less ran for two months and broke even; Aufricht later judged it the best of all the productions which he sponsored. Then The Threepenny Opera returned for the rest of the season, and the problem of the next play had to be faced.

Aufricht wanted another Brecht–Weill work on the same lines as before. It was scheduled once more for 31 August; Engel and Neher were again booked, and a number of the same actors already under contract. But the moment had passed, the first symptoms of the imminent economic crisis were beginning to make themselves felt, the veneer of political tolerance was wearing thin. Brecht had a seismographic feeling for such changes, and he was already heading towards a much more didactic kind of theatre, in which he briefly also managed to involve Weill. As a result Happy End, the Chicago comedy which was supposed to follow up The Threepenny Opera’s success, never really stirred his interest or drew the same inspired ideas from him as had Gay’s inherently much superior original. Superficially the prospects might have seemed the same as before, with Elisabeth Hauptmann providing the basic dialogue and Brecht writing a number of characteristic songs, some of them eliciting first-rate settings from Weill. But whereas in 1928 Brecht was willing to make many radical changes in the former, so that his stamp on the final play is unmistakable, only a year later this was no longer the case. At some point during

the spring of 1929 he began writing his first Lehrstücke or didactic plays under the twofold influence of the Japanese Noh drama and Hindemith’s concept of Gemeinschaftsmusik – the educational implications of making music in common. Two works for that summer’s Baden-Baden festival resulted. Almost at the same time his hitherto uncommitted left-wing opinions crystallised as a consequence, it seems, of the Berlin May Day demonstration at which the police killed thirty-one people. From then on he was aligned with the German Communist Party, and if this led him to foist a more ‘provocative’ ending on Happy End it also helped further to alienate him from that play without making it appear any better in the eyes of the party critics.

But, however Brecht himself might be changing at this time, The Threepenny Opera was a play which he had no wish to discard. Obviously it was a very much better and solider work than its successor, though the latter’s rehabilitation in the 1960s (which has led it to be performed under Brecht’s name in both England and the U.S.) shows the silliness of its text to be not quite the liability it once seemed. The major difference, however, lay in the former work’s enormous success, which kept it running in different parts of Germany until the Nazis took over and in other countries longer still. This did not immediately tempt Brecht to tinker with the text of the play (as he continued to do with Man equals Man), but when Warner Brothers and Tobis, acting through producers called Nero-Film, contracted in May 1930 to make a film version he started looking at it with changed – and changing – eyes. Though sound film was then in its infancy, the prospects seemed good: G. W. Pabst was to be the director, Lania (of Piscator’s old collective) to write the script; Carola Neher would play Polly, Lenya Jenny; while Brecht and Weill were given a say respectively in the script and the music. Two parallel versions would be made, one German and one French. That summer, accordingly, Brecht wrote Lania the treatment called ‘Die Beule’, ‘The Bruise’, which in effect ignores all that had remained of The Beggar’s Opera and uses the characters and the Victorian London setting to point a radically changed moral. Everything now is on a larger scale – the gang is 120 strong, Peachum heads a Begging Trust – and a higher social level, with peers, a general and a magistrate at Macheath’s wedding in the ducal manège. The gang and the beggars this time are engaged in a war whose symbol is the bruise inflicted by the former on a beggar called Sam. Peachum accordingly uses the beggars to disfigure the smartly repainted slum streets through which the Queen is to pass; he interviews Brown with seven lawyers behind him, and secures Macheath’s arrest after a bucolic picnic and a chase in which a car full of policemen pursues a car full of whores. There is no escape and no second arrest. Under Polly’s direction the gang has simply taken over the National Deposit Bank and converted itself into a group of solemn financiers. Both they and Mrs Peachum now become uneasy about the dangers of unleashing the poor; while Brown has a terrible dream, in which thousands of poor people emerge from under one of the Thames bridges as a great flood, sweeping through the streets and public buildings. So the ‘mounted Messengers’ this time are the bankers who arrive to bail Macheath out; and rather than disappoint the crowds Peachum hands over Sam to be hanged instead. The social façades are maintained as Macheath joins the reunited bourgeoisie awaiting the arrival of their Queen.

This scheme, on which Neher and the Bulgarian director Slatan Dudow also collaborated, was plainly unwelcome to the producers, and the fact that Brecht only met

the agreed August deadline by communicating it to Lania orally did not improve matters. Though Lania needed him to continue working the Nero firm chose to dismiss Brecht at this stage, and brought in the Communist film critic Béla Balázs to help complete the script. A law suit followed, which Brecht lost, and thereafter he had no words too bad for Pabst’s film, which meanwhile went obstinately ahead, to be shown in Berlin on 19 February 1931. Though the long theoretical essay which Brecht thereafter wrote on the ‘Threepenny Lawsuit’, as he termed it, is an illuminating work, not least for its links with the ideas of his new friend Walter Benjamin, the modern reader should not allow its downright condemnation to put him off the film. For in fact not only did the latter capture aspects of the original (for instance Carola Neher’s interpretation of Polly) that necessarily elude any modern production, but it also incorporates a surprising proportion of Brecht’s changes to the story. These, however, continued to itch Brecht, so that while leaving the play itself as it had been in the 1928 production (with all its last-minute decisions and improvisations) he was soon planning its further development in The Threepenny Novel, his one substantial work of fiction, which he was to hand in to its Dutch publisher some months after leaving Germany in 1933. Engel, when he came again to direct the play at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm for the Berliner Ensemble in 1960, after Brecht’s death, wondered at first if he could not incorporate some of the ideas from ‘The Bruise’ and the novel, but soon decided that they were too divergent from the play. Brecht for his part wrote some topical versions of the songs (p. 85 ff.) for other directors in the immediate post-war years, but it is not clear if and when they were used, and certainly he never made them a permanent part of the text; indeed they hardly merit it. All the same, his discussions in connection with Giorgio Strehler’s Milan production in the last year of his life (p. 100) show that he regarded The Threepenny Opera as no inviolable museum piece. For he envisaged a new framework, and welcomed Strehler’s updating of the story to the era of the Keystone Cops.