TOM LEONARD : MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN at AYEWRITE

Tom Leonard has navigated the very treacherous ( they are no socialists! , he cries) waters of the Bertolt Brecht Foundation to create a moving , current , Scottish version of the classic play written around the beginning of WW2.According to the Amazon blurb"the Thirty Years War becomes the War on Terror and Mother Courage is a working-class woman from the West of Scotland speaking the racy working-class nonstandard language of Glasgow. The rest of the cast speak varieties of English language subtly shaded for irony, accent and all the social hierarchies carried by diction and regional language in a land where diction is an index of class."

The original Mother Courage comes from a Novel of the 17th Century dealing with the horrors of The 30 Years War which claims over a quarter of the population of the present day Germanic lands ( a total that would amount to about 25 Million souls using todays populations)and led to the current and entirely understandable concern Germany has even today about any conflict in Europe being a potential catalyst for major upheavals within Germany itself.Even in surveys carried out in 1955 ,when the pain and loss of WW2 was still barely a decade old, still considered the events of 1618-1648 as the most traumatic and destructive period of German history.

The talk contained many segments from a select group of actors who had done a rehearsed reading of the play at The Tron the night before.If and when it does get permission to be an official stage production it promises to be a very moving piece that would capture and enhance the original conception by Brecht.

An entry from his journal blog gives a good indication of the immense amount and thought had has gone into this four year project to do justice to the original and add to the theme of the play which is that "the war" never does seem to go away , especially not for the poorer classes which either have to fight it or suffer the costs and depredations of the intervening periods, it is always with us to a lesser or greater degree depending on where we wage it , to that end Tom made the very pertinent observation that if the pullout from Afghanistan happens it will be the first time in over a 100 years that Britain has not been engaged in some form or another in military action , though the prospects of some form of "Humanitarian" campaign before the pullout may continue this very inglorious record.

"Talking with the actors about Mother Courage and her Children on Saturday and Sunday, I mentioned that in the middle of translating I bought the print books of  the Scottish artist Muirhead Bone’s series The Western Front that he made for the War Office in 1917. It seemed appropriate whilst I was as it were travelling across the desolate war terrain of Mother Courage’s Europe, to travel visually with Muirhead Bone—whose work I have always liked—on his journey through the devastated war terrain of France.  
It struck me as no more than my getting “mental atmosphere” as I wrote, but after  listening to the end of the play on Saturday and Sunday  

it struck me that the translation in the last line had of course been triggered at the back of my mind by the famous recruiting poster of those days YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU. The last line is a kind of bitter parthian invocation to the audience.

I put up two of the Muirhead Bone posters on my journal while translating the play in July 2010. This one below is another in the series, the foreground including, according to its accompanying description, old trenches and dugouts."

Curiously Tom refers to a very Celtic connection he feels towards Mother Courage and her attitudes to the trials and tribulations of her life and family tragedies.This may not be far from the truth as in T.M Devines book about the Scottish role in the Empire  from 1600-1815 gives details of many Scots mercenary soldiers and sometimes their families travelling the German and polish lands selling merchandise when not employed for military service in the very manner that Mother Courage plies her trade.Ironically there were so many Scots in Poland under-cutting the locals and cornering semi-skilled trades that many Polish Cities enacted laws to prevent Scots taking the local Poles jobs.How things have turned around in the last four centuries.