Learning to drive Mother Courage’s cart
For a play that is often referred to as one the theatrical masterpieces of the 20th century, Mother Courage and Her Children is a play that is not staged very often. I suppose, like many plays that have had long lives, it comes in and out of fashion. But I also suppose that we don’t see it more often because a respectful and passionate mounting of the play requires more meticulousness and care than most theatre companies can provide. This past fall, even the National Theatre in London, England, had to cancel one preview performance and do partial performances for another. Fiona Shaw, who played Mother Courage in that production, wrote a terrific rehearsal diary for the Times Online, and two days before first preview, she wrote the following during a tech rehearsal:
I am called for a change into scene 4. We are moving on. Stephen Kennedy, who is playing the pastor, and I spend every spare moment crunching lines and discussing the essence of what we might try in the impending performance. It is so terrifying I wish we were the Berlin Ensemble and had six months to rehearse. If we get this on in the time it will be a miracle.
As I write this, during my day off before our final week of rehearsal, I could be the kind of ingratiating theatrical shill who promises that our NAC English Theatre production has effortlessly resolved all issues and is on the triumphant road to this year’s must-see coup de théâtre, but that would be a hollow and patently false statement. I’m exhausted and a little depressed, but although I’m part of a tight ensemble, I have absolutely no claims on the job of carrying our production. I can only relate empathetically to the stress and fear that are simmering in those in our company who have to do more of the heavy dramatic lifting. We finished our last rehearsal of the week at midnight on Saturday; whereas the end of the work week is usually celebrated with a group trip to the bar, many of us decided to head straight home to rest.
So what the hell is it about this play that makes it so daunting? I’m hard-pressed to come up with a single answer, which somehow seems a propos to play whose scope defies any concise description or aphoristic synopsis. David Hare, who is one of many folks who have adapted the work from its original German, said that Mother Courage is a play that was written in three months and refined for twelve years. What is absolutely clear to us, in lifting the play off the page in Peter Hinton’s new adaptation, is that we could fill our lives with a years’ ceaseless work illuminating its infinite facets and paradoxes… after which we’d finish looking at scene one and give scene two a try.
Whole libraries full of books have been populated with analysis of Bertolt Brecht’s approach to theatre (you can even read about my three-week Ark experience here), but one significant aspect of our production focuses on Brecht’s love of dialectic construction. Basically, this means that Brecht gleefully presents both sides of an issue as equal and opposite. He takes great pleasure, I suspect, in finishing one scene with Mother Courage saying “I curse the war,” and starting the next scene with Mother Courage saying “I won’t let anybody spoil my war for me!” Both statements, in their respective contexts, make sense; audience members are left grappling with the contradiction and must arrive at their own opinion of which statement they prefer.
Back to the problem at hand, though. Scene 5 stands out for me as prime example of the immense booby-trap in which we find ourselves. On one side of the stage we see Mother Courage’s canteen-cart, where business is doing well and drinks are being served to soldiers who can pay for them. On the other side of the stage we see the chaos of a house barely standing after it’s been sieged and looted by those same soldiers. Injured people are hauled out of the house as soldiers and Mother Courage watch; a helpless baby is trapped inside the house. The dynamics of action on stage are complex enough:in the presence of soldiers, clergy, and even a daughter who runs into the burning house, Courage is publicly called upon to sacrifice business for the sake of helping strangers. And on top of the dramatic horror of dismembered civilians and the danger inherent in running into a burning house, Brecht layers the sounds of an army’s victory parade. It’s less than five minutes of theatre that executes with the precision of a fight sequence, and whose morality could be the subject of a Master’s thesis. It’s downright daunting. There are many productions where scene 5 is cut altogether.
What we have in Peter Hinton, however, is an adapter and director of singular tenacity. I’ve worked with Peter on a few productions now, and I have never, ever, ever heard him utter the words “it’s good enough”. If a stage picture is unclear, it must be addressed. If a moment is imprecise, it must be examined. Time will be taken to ensure that attention is paid to every detail. And there is so much detail.
Our move from the rehearsal hall to the theatre has introduced new elements that have had earthquake-like impacts on all of the painstaking work we’ve been doing since October. The technical elements of this play are almost comically-simple relative to the work we presented in A Christmas Carol last month, but the focus and clarity and precision required on the part of our company of eighteen actors is of a scope many of us have never experienced. We want to get it right, and Peter wants to help us get it right, and so progress on stage has been slower than anyone anticipated.
When I described the technical rehearsals for Christmas Carol, I mentioned three hours spent on a single scene change. For Mother Courage and Her Children, we’re spending hours clarifying how the message of the onstage action is affected by everything from how far apart actors are to the way props are handled and every imaginable variation in between. The irony is that, like A Christmas Carol, Mother Courage and Her Children will be functioning at 100% when audience members wonder what all the fuss was about, because it all looks very minimalist and straightforward. To paraphrase Edward Albee, sometimes you have to go a very long distance out of your way in order to come back a short distance correctly.
Analogously, it reminds me of learning to drive a car. I remember sitting behind the wheel of my mom’s Ford Tempo for the first time, at age 15, terrified of how it was even possible to manage pedals, and steer, and check mirrors, and keep an eye on speed, and follow traffic signals, all at the same time. Now — like many — I can drive from home to work without even remembering how I did it.
And so I have gone a very long distance out of my way to say that I simply do not know how ready we’ll be for our first pay-what-you-can preview audience this week, and take some comfort in the knowledge that this play has conquered many, many companies before ours. With six very full and focused days of rehearsal on the stage, we have yet to finish working all the way through the play once, and I am only cautiously optimistic that we may manage to wrap it up some time tomorrow, during day seven. We’re still figuring out where the pedals in the car are, and how to adjust the mirrors, and hoping we never have to parallel park in the snow.
But it’ll get there.
This is a week when I must remind myself that there is a difference between a preview performance (which is still a rehearsal) and an actual performance; and even though we will have members of the public watching us work as of Tuesday, we don’t actually open until Friday. Our preview audiences will, I expect, get a few glimpses of the foundation as we put the finishing touches on the walls.
Tags: Kris Joseph, NAC, National Arts Centre, Theatre
