Reader Reviews for Mother Courage And Her Children (Collected Plays):
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent!
Comment: Our son used the book this summer to become familiar with the play. He was selected to be one of the characters and the book helped him.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: You'll feel like you've been pulling Mother Courage's cart for 3 hours!
Comment: Directors and Producers of the world, do not do this to your audiences! This play is 3 hours of pure torture, and for what? There is no truth or beauty here. The basic message is that Mother Courage has a love/hate relationship with the war, but ultimately decides she has to make a living even though it costs the lives of all her children. Gives new meaning to the term "cold, hard capitalism", which I guess is what the playwright is railing against, although not very effectively. I say that because watching this play gave me a sense of what it would be like to live under Communism. The ugliness portrayed here made me feel cold and depressed, like there was nothing good in the world. (Harry Potter fans will understand what I mean when I say I felt like I'd had an encounter with a dementor after watching this play.) If the communist playwright was trying to win converts to Marxism, he failed so far as I am concerned. The message is not only anti-capitalism, it is anti-faith, and makes soldiers out to be depraved and animalistic.
So, if you can't tell. I hated it, and I hope that I can persuade anyone thinking about spending hours of creative energy producing, performing or attending this play not to bother. Do society a favor and spend your effort on something that will inspire positive social change. While it has some interesting moments, it goes on way longer than is necessary to make the author's point, which has very little validity anyway. Perhaps the only valid point is that the "powers that be" start wars for many reasons (often religous or economic), and innocent and unaware citizens have to live with the consequences that usually far outlast the conflict.
Customer Rating:
Summary: All is lost in war
Comment: It is a good, good play,
that is what they say.
The English translation of the songs is pretty good.
It is definitely great literature, even in translation.
I've read Greek master drama/ tragedy that wasn't as convincing.
The characters are realistic
and the situations are true to life.
But in the realism is the blow of a weapon
that strikes us.
Courage fails the brave mother
as her children are stripped from her in death by war.
Customer Rating:
Summary: WAR- UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
Comment: In what appears to be a permanent war in Iraq it is not untimely to address the question posed by Bertolt Brecht of how individuals caught up on the margins of warfare cope, for good or evil, with the traumas, unappetiting personal decisions and unmitigated horror of it. Brecht, the master Communist playwright, has taken a story of a working mother's struggle to survive as a camp following petty merchant in the Thirty Years War of the 17th century in Germany as his backdrop to investigate one aspect of that phenomena- the elemental struggle for individual survival. And it is not pretty. This mother is not the mother who gains increased political consciousness in another Brecht classic-The Mother. Far from it.
If the simple moral of the story is that war does nothing to elevate the human spirit or bring out the better instincts of our nature Brecht has made his point in rather stark terms. The struggle of Mother Courage to keep her `mom and pop' business going at the cost of the lives of her children may not go down well with today's more squeamish audiences but the unfortunate fact is that all over the world, and most notably in today's Iraq, those very same kind of cold, calculating decisions are being made by families in order to survive. The fact that it is a mother, the source of life and supposed nurturer-in-chief, who is sacrificing her children only makes that observation more compelling. Brecht wants us to see that, while greed and acquisitiveness may not be eternal human characteristics, under conditions of scarcity that have dominated most of human history the struggle has led to some very strange behavior. In the end his play is not only a cry against war but the economic conditions that engender war as well. That would require some mighty big changes. But we better think about it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Most Boring Play I have ever read.
Comment: There is not a single passage of entertainment in this play, or anything even scarcely enjoyable about the reading experience. You will never finish it unless you are at all interested in the Thirty Years War. If you're going to read anything by Brecht, try the witty 'Threepenny Opera', which succeeds at everything that Brecht needs to do to impart his political beliefs without putting his readers to sleep.
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