Mobilising Maurya: J. M. Synge, Bertolt Brecht and the Revolutionary Mother

This chapter examines the impact on modern drama of the establishment of the Soviet Union, through in-depth investigation of a special case: Bertolt Brecht’s transformation of J. M. Synge’s 1904 Riders to the Sea into a 1937 Spanish Civil War play called Señora Carrar’s Rifles. Synge and Ireland were not, for their own sakes, important to Brecht; he was drawn to Riders as a model which might help him solve the problem of how to radicalise the working-class mother. After the disastrous 1935 production of Brecht’s The Mother by the New York City-based Theatre Union, Brecht concluded that the technical demands of epic theater were beyond the capacity of these amateur ensembles. Synge’s unusual treatment of maternal grief in Riders helped Brecht envision a means of producing the effects of epic theater while using the techniques of realism. Helene Weigel’s performance as Teresa Carrar was crucial to his later thinking about acting and spectator emotion. Re-presenting Maurya’s refusal to grieve for Bartley in both Senora Carrar’s Rifles and Mother Courage helped Brecht refine his understanding of alienation in ways which made epic theater more pleasurable for spectators without requiring Brecht to acknowledge that pleasure as a desired effect.