Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht

ritten in 1939, Mother Courage and Her Children saw its first stage production in Zurich in 1941, but it took the triumphant Paris visit of the Berlin Ensemble in 1954 to establish the play as one of the authentic masterpieces of the modern stage. It has since been playing before audiences in all of the major capitals of the world and is one of the perennial successes of the Ensemble. Mother Courage is the play in which Brecht made his most passionate statement against war, but perhaps Brecht's greatest achievement in the drama lies in the creation of the character of Anna Fierling, nicknamed "Mother Courage," the itinerant trader who drags her canteen through the blood and carnage of the Thirty Years' War and whose fatal error is to believe that she can make the war serve her ends. In this figure, Brecht has fashioned one of the most extraordinary characters in the literature of the drama -- a woman of enormous vitality, cunning, ingenuity, and strength who, whatever the intentions of her creator, never fails to captivate the audience or reader.