Prueba de hipótesis específicas

Hanif Kureishi, the British author and playwright, wrote his version of Mutter Courage early in his career, in 1984, for an RSC production directed by Howard Davies. He worked from a literal version prepared by Sue Davies, the director’s wife. Kuresihi’s first play,Soaking the Heat

was performed by the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1976, and he was writer in residence at the Royal Court in 1982. Aside from his novels, Kureishi is perhaps best known for the screenplay of Stephen Frear’s award-winning film, My Beautiful Laundrette(1985). Therefore, at the time of writing his version ofMother Courage, he was less widely known than he is now.1 Kureishi had already worked with Howard Davies on two plays: Outskirts, at the RSC (1981) and the Joint Stock production of Birds of Passage at the Hampstead Theatre (1983). Many of Kureishi’s original works deal with social issues in multicultural Britain, and his early works especially focus on ethnic and political change. Eddershaw describes Kureishi as a “socialist playwright” (100). Mother Courage was Kureishi’s second adaptation for the stage, and he described it as an “enjoyable thing to do because it is not as hard as writing your own play. You don’t feel the same pressure, because much of the structure, the dialogue, the characters are already there and because you know the play is good” (Julian, 1985, 7).2

6.1.1 Aims and Intentions: Translator and Director

Kureishi’s interview with Ria Julian inDramareveals something of the playwright’s understand- ing of Brecht’s work and the principles behind his approach to this project. Although this version was written for the RSC in 1984, the TTwas performed a second time, by the RNT Touring company in 1993. An examination of critics’ reviews of both productions will afford

insight into how the text was performed in each case. The textual analysis will focus on the Davies production, because the script was written for that performance. The text used for com- mentary in this study is the RSC’s prompt script, which contains textual changes made during rehearsal. Judging from the 1993 reviews, more radical changes must also have been made in the rehearsal process then too, but the author had no access to textual evidence in this case.

The two 1984 reviews which comment on Hanif Kureishi’s text do so positively, commending it as “eloquent and lucid” (Wardle, 1984) and “sparky and trenchant” (Barber, 1984). Likewise, the 1993 reviews speak of the “lively translation” (Billington, 1993a) and its “vigorous contem- porary argot” (Billington, 1993b). Such verdicts suggest that the language of thisTThas been modernised rather than that any attempt has been made to replicate the artificial seventeenth- century dialogue of the ST. Willett is the only TT author in this study explicitly to state an

1_{Kureishi had had five plays performed at London theatres beforeMother Courageopened at the Barbican in 1984.} He has since focussed more on writing screenplays and fiction than drama.

2_{The first adaptation wasCloser, from a play by Janusz Glowacki in 1981, and he also adapted Kafka’sDas Urteil} for BBC Radio 3 in 1982. The programme to the 1984 Barbican production lists Kureishi as translator, whereas the RNT Mobile Productions’ refers to him as the adapter.

6.1 Hanif Kureishi’sMother Courage awareness of the awkward nature of Brecht’s language and a desire to replicate it in English. A playwright with no German and only a received understanding of Brecht’s theatrical techniques is probably unaware of the deliberately uneven language, and a linguistically naturalised text is the inevitable outcome, as the reviews and the TT itself testify. The reviews do not men- tion Sue Davies’ involvement. The desire for an “eloquent and lucid” text was presumably the main reason why a playwright was asked to revise a literal prepared by a German-speaker, as Kureishi comments that scholars are rarely “able to produce speakable version, something that is dramatically effective” (Julian, 1985, 6). However, this is not the reason he cites for the RSC’s decision not to use Willett’s existing translation; rather he notes that Willett’s choice of a Northern English dialect impairs directorial freedom to determine the setting and thus restricts the play’s possible use, which demonstrates how unsuccessful Willett was in his aim to create a ‘clean sheet’ text for potential directors. The implication behind Kureishi’s words is that he sees his task as to provide a speakable, dramatically effective playtext which does not pre-empt any

directorial decisions.

Beyond Kureishi’s aims as the second agent in the two-tier translation process, his writing of aTTofMutter Couragewill also be affected by his view of Brecht and his intentions for the play

itself:

I have admired Brecht very much as a playwright and I suppose I liked Howard Brenton’s version ofGalileo, which I though was very witty and clever. That is one of the things I was hoping to do with this play. Make it warm and funny. Instead of it being a kind of long, tedious, stodgy anti-war play. I wanted Mother Courage’s warmth to come out. (Julian, 1985, 6)

It is ironic that Kureishi is setting out to highlight the very quality in Mother Courage which is most likely to create sympathy for her amongst the audience and thus jeopardise the condem- nation of her actions which Brecht worked so hard to ensure. The critics would confirm that Kureishi was successful in achieving his aim, although the following comparison of hisTTwith theSTreveals that this was more probably the result of the performance than of the text. Edder- shaw observes that in performance, some of Kureishi’s amendments result in a foregrounding of action over dialogue (100), which in itself suggests the performance was the driving force in this production and not the text. It is impossible to judge from the text alone where such foregrounding occurs and how, since no recording of the production exists.

Eddershaw notes that Davies was so concerned that this Brecht production should be suc- cessful that he insisted that the programme notes include a list of books he had consulted on Brecht, and she quotes him as saying he was “concerned to find a balance between the psy- chological reality of the individual character and the socio-political content of the play as a whole” (100). His aim thus overlaps with Kureishi’s in proposing to focus on the psychological aspects of the play: “Kureishi and Davies agreed that they wanted to emphasise and highlight qualities in Mother Courage of warmth and affection and in so doing they intended the au-

dience to empathise with the character more than might be expected in a Brecht play” (101). Consequently, despite Davies’ concern about the socio-political dimension of the play, in their hands, Courage becomes a “warm, youngish and randy” (ibid.) psychologically real character, no longer portrayed as a product of her social environment. As a result, the dialectic elements of the play fade, as does the didactic objective, not least due to the implications behind asser- tions such as Kureishi’s claim that “I don’t think there is anything left of the alienation concept inMother Courage. I think that in a way the character goes against some of the things Brecht believed about alienation” (Julian, 1985, 6). This may explain why in this production the songs were integrated seamlessly into the action and, as Irving Wardle, for example, commented, the production was missing the emotional peaks of the original Berliner Ensemble production (Wardle, 1984). In aiming for a warm, psychologically rounded Courage, removed from her socially-determined predicament and its associated didactic message, and with the text couched in a modern, informal register, theTTmay be found to have lost the deliberate and alienating lack of smoothness of the original along with its socio-political significance. Indeed, McCul- lough (1992) describes the production as “an intriguing case of cultural appropriation” (120) in which Kureishi and Davies claim to be liberating Brecht from the constraints of his political doctrine in reversing the delineations of epic theatre he so carefully laid out.

6.1.2 Linguistic Analysis

Linguistic analysis of a two-tier text inevitably involves a degree of conjecture unless the first tier, the ‘literal’ text, is also available. This is not the case here, and thus the information we have on Kureishi’s aims and intentions, coupled with the effect of changes in the text have to

suffice as a framework for hypotheses on the reasons behind any significant departure from the ST. The analysis below will reveal that there are discernible characteristics in Kureishi’s version ofMother Courage and her Children, but that these seem to be a consequence of the playwright’s personal writing style rather than of any attempt to identify and recreate features of Brecht’s original. The first of these can be seen in the translation of features of the STlanguage which replicate elements of Verfremdung in the mise en scène. Points of interest which arise in this category in Kureishi’s text relate to the Fixierung des Nicht-Sondern and Verfremdung within

Verfremdung in the announcement of emotion before a speech.

In a text written by someone who does not believe that “there is anything left of the alienation concept in Mother Courage”, it may seem futile to look for the replication of anyVerfremdung

effects in theST, and particularly ofVerfremdungwithinVerfremdung. In the opening speech of the play, the Recruiting Officer expresses exasperation in having to recruit in the area. Kureishi

makes this clearer than it is in the ST by opening with: “Do you know what I’m thinking about Sergeant? Suicide” (1). Brecht leaves this until the second line, after: “Wie soll man sich hier eine Mannschaft zusammenlesen?” (6:9). The changed position indicates the Recruiting Officer’s state of mind from the outset, and he can thus remain detached in the remainder of

6.1 Hanif Kureishi’sMother Courage the speech, placing the emphasis on event rather than character. However, Kureishi and Davies’ views on alienation presumably mean that there was no attempt to employ this distanced acting style, and thus the apparently strengthened Verfremdung can more appropriately be seen as no more then a more dramatic and attention-catching opening, and one which emphasises a subjective, psychological state rather than a man in a work situation.

The exchanging of these two sentences occurred during the rehearsal process rather than originating from Kureishi’s pen. In the prompt script, the original typed lines have been deleted and new ones hand-written in their place. It is thus not possible to determine whether Kureishi originally still translated the statement “Feldwebel, ich denk schon mitunter an Selbstmord” as a question but in the correct position, or not. Irrespective of whose the change is, it is significant that the opening line is still a question. The use of rhetorical questions can be viewed as part of the treatment of fate in the play, since the very act of questioning actions or statements is evidence of alternatives. In the translation of questions and statements, we find a characteristic trend in Kureishi’sTT: he often switches the two forms round. The opening dialogue shows one example of a statement translated as a question. It is a rhetorical question which is not aimed at prompting the audience to think about the socio-political dimension of the play and thus does not increase audience interaction. Another case among the numerous situations in which a statement in theSTis rendered as a question in theTTis Courage’s comment the Sergeant as she explains the origin of some of her family members: “Ich will Sie nicht beleidigen, aber Phantasie haben Sie nicht viel” (6:12) as “I don’t want to be rude Sergeant but have you no imagination?” (4). This was changed during rehearsal. Kureishi wrote “how much imagination have you got?”, which, unlike the performed version, does not suggest that as a matter of fact, he has none, but the change from statement to question is still Kureishi’s. Nevertheless, once more, the question is not calculated to impel the audience to reflect upon anything of importance to the play’s message. Therefore, in the numerous cases where Kureishi and/or the RSC production team render one of Brecht’s statements with a question, these do not strengthenVerfremdung which is already present or compensate for its loss elsewhere, but are added for stylistic purposes to enhance fluency in theTTdialogue.

The consideration that these additional questions could be a means of compensating for losses elsewhere is a valid one, since there are just as many cases where Brecht’s questions are rendered as statements, or question prompts are omitted. In the majority of cases, this has little effect for the audience, since the lines in question are not the key questions which should cause reflection, but there are a few notable exceptions. In response to the Recruiting Officer’s

opening speech, the Sergeant replies: “Man merkts, hier ist zu lang kein Krieg gewesen. Wo soll da Moral herkommen, frag ich?” (6:9). The twisted logic of the statement is reinforced by the question tag, and undoubtedly compels the audience to ask why he should say such a thing. This is not wholly eliminated in Kureishi’s TT, but it is weakened, as he merely asks:

“It’s too long since they had a war. Where else do you get decency?” (1).3 _{The loss of the} question tag makes the line less prominent and thus less likely to be taken up for examination by the spectators. A similar case occurs at the end of the same speech, as the Sergeant concludes his ruminations on the benefits of war by saying: “weil man eben weiß: Ohne Ordnung kein Krieg!” (6:9). Although this is not a question, the twisted logic of the statement and the generalisation of “weil man eben weiß” should prompt the audience to ponder whether or not this is true. Kureishi accurately rendered this as: “Everyone knows, without that kind of organisation you can’t have a war in the first place!” (1). In rehearsal, “[e]veryone knows” was deleted and replaced by “[l]et’s face it”. Although in essence, these two phrases are similar in meaning, and both still include the audience in their reasoning, the performance version is a rather empty rhetorical figure of speech, whereas Kureishi’s rendering is more likely to make the spectator wonder “do we?”. It is already plain that the use of language attributed to Kureishi or Brecht by reviewers is often the work of neither.

It is not just in cases of prompted audience reflection that Brecht shows that individuals are in control of their own fate. Debiel identified the modal particles, doch, aber anddennas markers of theFixierung des Nicht – Sondern, since they indicate choice.Dochis generally lost in Kureishi’s version, and with it, the indication of choice. In scene 3, as Swiss Cheese is captured, Courage appeals to her son to confess while directing her comments at his captors: “Er würde sie doch herausgeben, wenn er sonst hin wär” (6:39). Kureishi omits the ‘it goes without saying’ flavour ofdoch, but adds a qualification not in theST: “He’d give it to you. Especially if he had it. Better than dying” (31). This rendering does not indicate choice in the same way that the German does, but instead, adds irony in the additional phrase. This changes the weight of the line, making Courage sound uncertain and as though her appeal is directed more at the captors than the captive. This is underlined by the division of one line into three short statements. This is another characteristic of Kureishi’s text, which will be examined below.

One key example of the use ofaber is similar in essence to the general impression made by Kureishi’s text thus far, namely that the fundamental meaning of the text is retained, but the impact weakened. Consequently, the audience will be insensitive to critical messages which build towards the final judgement of Courage and what she represents of business and war. In scene 3, as she tries to fool Yvette so she can pay the bribe for Swiss Cheese’s life, Courage admits: “Ich muß das Geld haben, aber lieber lauf ich mir die Füße in den Leib nach einem Angebot, als daß ich gleich verkauf” (6:41-2). Kureishi’s slightly weakened version is: “I do need the money. But I’d rather run my feet offlooking for a loan than sell outright” (33). In

this rendering, the conflict between ‘muß’ and ‘aber’ is weakened through the rather lame ‘I do need’ rather than ‘I have to have’. The illogicality of her words is lost, compounded by the use of ‘loan’, resulting in the matter sounding significantly less urgent than it really is. In turn, our

3_{Again, the text was changed here. Kureishi’s original version of the first sentence was closer to the ST: “It’s been} too long since they had a war here”.

6.1 Hanif Kureishi’sMother Courage condemnation of Courage for her subsequent actions is lessened, since her initial choice not to pay the full amount for the bribe seems less heartless. This has consequences for the spectator’s ultimate verdict of her actions.

Aspects of Verfremdung as in the mise en scène are generally located in the fine detail of Brecht’s use of language. It is perhaps not surprising that they should be lost in the two-tier translation process, especially if the author of the ‘literal’ version is no Brecht specialist, and thus not sensitive to the extent to which the characteristics of epic theatre are woven into the very fabric of the dialogue. However, as the discussion moves to an examination of larger units of language used to achieveVerfremdung, even if the writer at neither stage is conscious of Brecht’s intent, the effect is more likely to be reproduced nevertheless. For example, semanticVerfrem- dung occurs in the dialogue which opens scene 3. Courage is bargaining with the Armourer