page_title: Mother Courage and Her Children
section_title: Performances
hierarchical_section_title: Mother Courage and Her Children / Performances
caption_attribution_description: English: Therese Giehse, portraying the main character of "Mother Courage" in Bertolt Brecht’s play "Mother Courage and Her Children"
context_page_description: Mother Courage and Her Children is a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht, with significant contributions from Margarete Steffin. Four theatrical productions were produced in Switzerland and Germany from 1941 to 1952, the last three supervised and/or directed by Brecht, who had returned to East Germany from the United States.
  Several years after Brecht's death in 1959/1960, the play was adapted as a German film starring Helene Weigel, Brecht's widow and a leading actress.
  Mother Courage is considered by some to be the greatest play of the 20th century, and perhaps also the greatest anti-war play of all time.
context_section_description: The play was originally produced at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, produced by Leopold Lindtberg in 1941. Most of the score consisted of original compositions by the Swiss composer Paul Burkhard; the rest had been arranged by him. The musicians were placed in view of the audience so that they could be seen, one of Brecht's many techniques in Epic Theatre. Therese Giehse, a well-known actress at the time, took the title role.
  The second production of Mother Courage took place in then East Berlin in 1949, with Brecht's (second) wife Helene Weigel, his main actress and later also director, as Mother Courage. Paul Dessau supplied a new score, composed in close collaboration with Brecht himself. This production would highly influence the formation of Brecht's company, the Berliner Ensemble, which would provide him a venue to direct many of his plays. Brecht died directing Galileo for the Ensemble. Brecht revised the play for this production in reaction to the reviews of the Zürich production, which empathized with the "heart-rending vitality of all maternal creatures". Even so, he wrote that the Berlin audience failed to see Mother Courage's crimes and participation in the war and focused on her suffering instead.
  The next production (and second production in Germany) was directed by Brecht at the Munich Kammerspiele in 1950, with the original Mother Courage, Therese Giehse, with a set designed by Theo Otto (see photo, above.)
  In Spanish, it was premiered in 1954 in Buenos Aires with Alejandra Boero and in 1958 in Montevideo with China Zorrilla from the Uruguayan National Comedy Company. In this language, the main character has also been played by actresses Rosa María Sardá (Madrid, 1986), Cipe Lincovsky (Buenos Aires, 1989), Vicky Peña (Barcelona, 2003), Claudia Lapacó (Buenos Aires, 2018) and Blanca Portillo (Madrid, 2019).
  In other languages, it was played by famous actresses as Simone Signoret, Lotte Lenya, Dorothea Neff (Vienna, 1963), Germaine Montero, Angela Winkler, Hanna Schygulla, Katina Paxinou (Athens, 1971), Maria Bill (Viena), María Casares (París, 1969), Pupella Maggio, Liv Ullmann (Oslo), Maddalena Crippa (Milán), etc.
  In 1955, Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop gave the play its London première, with Littlewood performing the title role.
  In June 1959 the BBC broadcast a television version adapted by Eric Crozier from Eric Bentley's English translation of the play. Produced by Rudolph Cartier; it starred Flora Robson in the title role.
  The play remained unperformed in Britain after the 1955 Littlewood production until 1961 when the Stratford-upon-Avon Amateur Players undertook to introduce the play to the English Midlands. Directed by American Keith Fowler and presented on the floor of the Stratford Hippodrome, the play drew high acclaim. The title role was played by Elizabeth ("Libby") Cutts, with Pat Elliott as Katrin, Digby Day as Swiss Cheese, and James Orr as Eiliff.
  The play received its American premiere at Cleveland Play House in 1958, starring Harriet Brazier as Mother Courage. The play was directed by Benno Frank and the set was designed by Paul Rodgers.
  The first Broadway production of Mother Courage opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on 28 March 1963. It was directed by Jerome Robbins, starred Anne Bancroft, and featured Barbara Harris and Gene Wilder. It ran for 52 performances and was nominated for four Tony Awards. During this production Wilder first met Bancroft's then-boyfriend, Mel Brooks.
  In 1971 Joachim Tenschert directed a staging of Brecht's original Berliner Ensemble production for the Melbourne Theatre Company at the Princess Theatre. Gloria Dawn played Mother Courage; Wendy Hughes, John Wood and Tony Llewellyn-Jones her children; Frank Thring the Chaplain; Frederick Parslow the cook; Jennifer Hagan played Yvette; and Peter Curtin.
  In 1980 Wilford Leach directed a new adaptation by Ntozake Shange at The Public Theater. This version was set in the American South during Reconstruction. Gloria Foster played Mother Courage in a cast that also included Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Hattie Wi
caption: Therese Giehse as Mother Courage by Günter Rittner
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2007:11:18 18:22:53", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4284", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "793", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1024"}