Mother Courage and Her Children

In this new translation by the distinguished Scottish poet Tom Leonard of Brecht's great 1939 anti-war play "Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder," 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. Best known for his early poems in Glasgow dialect such as 'The Six o'clock News', Tom Leonard invests his translation with the arguments about language and politics that have run as a thread through all his work for almost fifty years. It is a play about the language of politics and the politics of language. As Leonard says, 'the hero of this Mother Courage is the language itself, and it is an anti-hero. Only Kattrin is allowed in her final action to be a proper hero - and she is dumb.'