The San Francisco Mime Troupe's: The Mother

Extract

To me The Mother is one of Brecht's worst plays, sentimental and party-dogmatic. Later on in his career, I tell them [Denny Stevens and Steve Friedman of the Mime Troupe], he [Brecht] learned how to do these things much better, how to sink dialectic into the human situation…. And when I insist on the play's being a lesser work, I get a very cold smile from Steve: “We disagree entirely.”

Review by Michael Feingold in the Village Voice (2 December 1974)

Written in 1930-1931 after a Party directive to bring more women into the various German Communist organizations and first produced in January, 1932, Brecht's adaptation of the well-known Maxim Gorky novel, The Mother, was the subject of an intense esthetic and political debate among theatre critics and left-based theatre workers.