Mother Courage and Her Children

War feeds Mother Courage and her children. It is her trade and her downfall at once. As a canteen woman, she hauls her covered wagon across Europe in the wake of the Thirty Years' War armies and the streams of refugees. She does business at the cost of humanity. Torn between greed and maternal love, cunning, conformism and a defiant peasant shrewdness, she holds her own as a modern businesswoman in a rough man's world. She wants to "make her cut" whatever the price - yet all she really wants is to get her family through the brutality of war. But the laws of the market and of violence are stronger than she is. Every attempt to keep her children away from the gears of war ends in disaster.

Bertolt Brecht's famous parable portrays a society that surrenders unconditionally to the deadly laws of the market, with a strong and deeply ambivalent female figure at its centre.