Mother Courage and Her Children
A canteen woman drags her wagon through the Thirty Years' War, profiting from the conflict that kills all three of her children. Brecht designed it as epic theater: the audience should think, not feel. But Mother Courage's stubborn survival makes audiences feel anyway, which annoyed Brecht enormously.
Read cold, without a strong lead to carry it, several reviewers find the play one of the hardest assigned texts to sit through, since Brecht's own alienation effect works almost too well and holds the audience at arm's length rather than pulling them in. Mother Courage herself is hard to root for, and one critic put the complaint plainly: the character “fails to fully win our empathy,” whether or not that's the point Brecht intended. The didactic quality bothers other readers, who feel lectured at rather than dramatized, and pacing drags across a three-hour running time until the war-weariness onstage becomes the audience's own fatigue. One review of a recent staging went further, arguing “a leaner edit would surely benefit the play's dramatic momentum” even when the central performance was carrying the show.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
