Señora Carrar's Rifles is a one-act play by the twentieth-century German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 dramatist Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...

, written in collaboration with Margerete Steffin. It is a modern version of the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge

John Millington Synge

Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre...

's play Riders to the Sea

Riders to the Sea

Riders to the Sea is a play written by Irish playwright John Millington Synge. It was first performed on February 25, 1904 at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin by the Irish National Theater Society. A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran Islands, and like all of Synge's plays it is noted for...

(1904). The play's setting

Setting (fiction)

In fiction, setting includes the time, location, and everything in which a story takes place, and initiates the main backdrop and mood for a story. Setting has been referred to as story world or milieu to include a context beyond the immediate surroundings of the story. Elements of setting may...

 is re-located to Spain during the height of the Civil War

Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

. Teresa Carrar, the mother, wants to protect her children but ends up fighting on the side of the oppressed. Brecht wrote it in 1937 and it received its first theatrical production in the same year, opening in Paris on 16 October. This production was directed by Slatan Dudow

Slatan Dudow

Slatan Theodor Dudow was a Bulgarian born film director and screenwriter who made a number of films in the Weimar Republic and East Germany....

 and Helene Weigel

Helene Weigel

Helene Weigel was a distinguished German actress. She was the second wife of Bertolt Brecht, and together they had a son Stefan Brecht and daughter Barbara Brecht-Schall .The daughter of a Jewish lawyer, she became a Communist Party member from 1930 and Artistic Director of the...

 played Señora Carrar.

Its form is more traditional than most of Brecht's other "epic

Epic theatre

Epic theatre was a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and, most famously, Bertolt Brecht...

" plays. It is written entirely in the Aristotelian mode and uses dramatic illusion, prose

Prose

Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...

 dialogue

Dialogue (fiction)

Dialogue in fiction is a verbal exchange between two or more characters. If there is only one character, who is talking to himself in his mind, it is known as interior monologue.-Identifiers:...

 and a non-epic structure

Dramatic structure

Dramatic structure is the structure of a dramatic work such as a play or film. Many scholars have analyzed dramatic structure, beginning with Aristotle in his Poetics...

. It became the most frequently performed play in East Germany because it violated Brecht's anti-empathetic theories

Non-Aristotelian drama

Non-Aristotelian drama, or the 'epic form' of the drama, refers to a kind of play whose dramaturgical structure departs from the features of classical tragedy in favour of the features of the epic, as defined in each case by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics .The German...

 and conformed to the approved Socialist realist

Socialist realism

Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...

model of dramatic form.

Works cited

• Willett, John. 1967. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects. Third ed. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413 34360 X.