Theories of labour: physically scoring Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children with Stanislavski, viewpoints, and composition

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay discusses my direction of Tony Kushner’s translation of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children and the ways in which I transposed my understanding of Stanislavski’s Method of Physical Action and my practice of Viewpoints to work with actors to make tangible the play’s anti-capitalist philosophy: by having them score their scripts with “payment” and “profit” rather than the typical Stanislavskian terms “tactic” and “objective,” and by using Viewpoints to craft character and scenic gestus, a term Brecht used to define physical actions and stage compositions that conveyed social meaning.