What is play about?. I was curious about the new version of Bertolt Brecht’s classical play ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ before I went to National Theatre.While I watched the play and took my seat as an audience. The atmosphere here is very relaxed, the staffs were busy with their works on the stage, and various kinds of theatre equipment and props were exposed in front of the audience. Although actors try to attracted audience’s attention by using sounds and take action.
I guess it is all the director make arrangement for the play, it examined Brecht’s 'alienation' (or verfremdungseffekt) theory. They deliberately made the viewer aware of that this is an hypothetical theatre event, preparation for the performance. so contrast with the Aristotle's traditional theater theory, Brecht intended to push the audience into an observer’s position, to stimulate audience’s active thinking and evaluating about the performance. but not watch it passively, which attempt to integrate connotation into the audience‘s feeling surrounding the performance. make sense of that the event is real happened. Brecht’s play examine that the audience can not confuse what they see on the stage and the reality of life. In another word they must recognize that performance, as a theater event, have to be watched and criticized. I was really thinking about the meaning of the arrangement on the stage by watching the process. My first impression of the play was very good.
The play ‘Mother Courage and her Children’ depict a woman nicknamed ‘mother courage’ and her two sons and a mute daughter doing business with the army in order to earn more money during the Thirty Years War. She was suffering from the war, ultimately she lost each of her children as a result. It was a big blow for her, also for the audience. It made me feel it is really a ruthless war owing to loss family member.
In this play, the mother courage was figured as a very modern woman. She dressed in a very modern style, and her personality is very strong and uninhibited. When the scene changed, all actors changed their costumes directly on the stage, also the staff came to prepare the props. But these work did not interrupt the whole performance, it is a part of the performance very nature and dramatic.
During the play, the band with their music also attracted all my attention. Sometimes the stage looks like a big concert. And obviously it is more easy to drive the input of mood as a wheel track following the performance.Indeed, the music is very brilliant, and touched people at the same time. In the other side it created some break time to lead the audience back to earlier performance to rethink it.
All in all, the whole range of the emotion in the play had practice in Brecht’s theory and combined contemporary element. It shown me an modern epic theatre as an example.
Walkaround Time was created by John Cage and Merce Cunningham
