Aboriginalizing Mother Courage: Brecht in Australia

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the crucial role of Brechtian aesthetics in representing the voice of Aboriginal Australians. It examines the theatre of Wesley Enoch, an Aboriginal Australian director and playwright, and argues that Enoch’s 2013 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, performed at the Queensland Theatre Company, Brisbane, formed an instance of resistance against epistemic hegemony. The first part of the article examines the device of the heckler, central to the writings of Australian Aboriginals, by focusing on Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers (1988) and shows how the device functions to articulate the peripheral voices of the Aboriginal Australians. The second part demonstrates how Enoch employed the heckler trope through his dramaturgy to protest against the Australian nation state. Broadly, it illustrates how Enoch’s production used Aboriginal aesthetics to voice Aborigines’ challenge to established norms, an act that remained independent of Brechtian theatre’s previous uses in the Australian context.

KEYWORDS:

• Wesley Enoch
• Australian theatre
• Brecht
• Aboriginal
• heckler
• didgeridoo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Prateek

Dr Prateek is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. He completed his PhD in theatre studies at the University of Queensland, Australia, with visiting fellowships at Oxford and Humboldt universities. He wrote his MPhil at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. He is a recipient of two Fulbright fellowships: the Fulbright fellow at Yale University (2010–11) and the Fulbright-Nehru postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University (2021–22). He has published in national and international journals on culture and theatre such as South Asian Review, Brecht Yearbook, and Performance Research. His monograph Brecht in India: The Poetics and Politics of Transcultural Theatre (2021) was published by Routledge, UK.