In a play, we typically expect an established setting and an even chronological ordering of our events. Usually, these events occur in real time and without gaps causing the plot of the play to remain consistent and coherent. For example, in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play start in Athens, moves to the forest and then returns back to Athens, which gives us an established setting where all the action takes place. Furthermore, that story takes place over the course of an evening, and the time of the play is consistent and uninterrupted, which makes it easier to follow. These conventions are rather useful, but as we have learned in class, are often broken with more modern works. Mother Courage and Her Children breaks these conventions by having many different settings and having a choppy chronology that adds a level of uncertainty that is fitting for war and the characters.
Each of the twelve scenes starts in a new setting, which forces the audience to be keenly aware of the changes in set and action. While almost all the scenes begin right outside of war camps, others, such as the eleventh scene begin in small towns where Mother Courage is replenishing her goods. The action of the play does not allow the audience to understand that the setting has changed, rather it must be implied by a change in set or noted. For example in our reading, the changes in set were noted right before each scene, which allowed a reader to understand the new setting without requiring visual cues. That being said, sometimes the settings were not established, as in the case of scene ten. This scene was particularly vague because it is so short. All it contains is a song coming from a peasant's house. You know that Mother Courage and Kattrin are pulling the cart somewhere in Germany, but the plot does not allow us to thoroughly understand that. With those discrepancies noted, the change in plot does provide an interesting dynamic to this play that particularly highlights the struggle of war. These characters are homeless, and by the end, Mother Courage has lost all of her children to the war. The constant change in setting and talk of travel provides a sense of ambiguity to the play; the audience never knows where Mother Courage will be next and is uncertain of her survival. I like the unpredictable dynamic added to this play through the changes in setting because it seems like a plausible situation for these characters.
The drastic jumps in time also add a degree of uncertainty to this play. Throughout the plot, scenes jump in time from a few days to a few years. It is often difficult to perceive the passage of time because the audience wants to assume that the plot is a seamless string of events. In fact, this plot is quite the opposite. We can almost divide the play into mini-stories that are related, but at different times and involve many different characters. If more detail was added to any of the scenes, one could easily become it’s own story. This fact is probably the most difficult to overcome as an audience member because the passage of many years is also difficult to portray. Making the characters and cart appear older is not particularly easy, and the constant change of setting means that the sets will not show age. However, this adds to unpredictable nature of the character’s lives and is suitable for wartime. Brecht does an exceptional job at keeping the character’s lives interesting, which makes this a fun play to read.
Mother Courage and Her Children has a plot that is unreliable in the sense that we cannot easily predict what will happen next. As an audience it is impossible to predict the next scene because of the changing time gaps and constantly wavering lives of the characters. While this play breaks the conformity of having constant settings and seamless chronology, the ambiguity brought into the plot by breaking these rules is very suitable for a play about wartime and poverty.
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