There is no issue as unavoidably topical for the modern world as war. In Russia, most people know at least one person who has been drawn into it. The theater, which is supposed to be a mirror reflection of life, will now and again give the theme its full due.

The staging of Bertold Brecht's play "Mother Courage and Her Children" at the Mossovet Theater is just such an example. The production manages to avoid excessive pathos, primarily because artistic director Pavel Khomsky combines colorful and perceivable forms for Brecht's overwhelmingly sad and serious theme.

Khomsky has transformed the lengthy and overburdened play-chronicle into a spectacular show. It is almost a musical, but it preserves the so-called "clip-out genre" of which Bertold Brecht was the founder.

Images change at an incredible speed. Strange, sometimes grotesque, and sometimes deeply sincere faces of the people of war flit across the stage like pictures in a kaleidoscope. The two-faced and shifty priest (Alexander Yatsko), a materialistic and cynical cook (Anatoly Vasilyev), the presumptuous commander-in-chief (Vyacheslav Butenko) and the drunken Ivetta (Irina Klimova), to name but a few. Only one figure remains permanent and unchangeable — that of canteen worker Anna Firling, alias Mother Courage. Acted by Valentina Talyzina, the role is played with exceptional fidelity and some bitter and purely feminine understanding.

Khomsky's staging creates the impression that Mother Courage is crushed by the war from the very start. There is nothing left for her life but unlimited cynicism. Saying "I have no soul but I need some firewood," her caravan-canteen is not so much a shelter or a way to survive as it is a ‘cross,' or a self-imposed penance.

Receiving blow after blow, losing her kids one after one, she stubbornly carries her ‘cross' repeating, like an incantation: "I have to trade!" But each time she says them, the words convey even more hopeless desperation. The war cannot be stopped with good intentions. Nor can it be comprehended with the help of logical constructions.

In the final scene, the dead rise and march down the stage. Against a background of a deafening march a voice pronounces the bitter and dreadful phrase: "Everyone of them had once been killed," making you feel that a human is too weak to overcome the elemental violence of the disaster called war. There is no choice left but to try to alter one's perception of reality, however brutal and cruel it is.

Even though the attempt to survive had failed, the bare fact that such an attempt was made is optimistic in itself. "Mother Courage" is not about death so much as about life.

MOSSOVET THEATER
16 Bol. Sadovaya Ul. (inside the Aquarium Garden)
Metro: Mayakovskaya
Tel: 299-2035
The nearest dates to see the play are September 9 and September 23