Michelle Terry, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, takes on one of theatre’s great female roles in Anna Jordan’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s coruscating condemnation of the soul-destroying endlessness of warfare, directed by Globe associate artist Elle While.
Brecht wrote Mother Courage in 1939, as fascism overtook Europe, but deliberately set it several hundred years earlier, during the Thirty Years War – intending the distance to provide a kind of allegorical universality. Jordan’s version goes further, never naming the conflict, only identifying sides by differing colours. ‘Grids’ replace countries. References to drones give it modernity, but it’s clearly meant to be anywhere and everywhere.
It’s an approach that enables us to map its grimly picaresque story of a mother trying to keep her children alive, while seeking also to profiteer from the ruthless supply-and-demand of war, on to any conflict. The sweary, grubby dialogue has a carelessly cynical authenticity. However, while the relentless repetition of opportunity, gain and loss is key, the lack of specificity in Jordan’s translation highlights its heavily episodic nature.
This makes an anchoring central performance – one that gives us a toehold during the play’s grim carousel of events – particularly important. Thankfully, Terry is astonishingly good as Mother Courage. She’s bawdy, broken and ferocious, with a physicality always halfway between entreaty and attack. While she’s more sympathetic than Brecht famously wanted Courage to be, she’s complicated. Her love for her children is fiercely protective but also bruising, her churning of scraps into profit inbuilt.
There’s strong work from the actors orbiting her, particularly from Vinnie Heaven as Courage’s son Eiliff, bristling with the itch to fight but tragically naïve about how war never plays fair. Rawaed Asde’s gentleness and honesty as his brother Swiss Cheese provides a no less ill-fated counterpoint, while Rachelle Diedericks makes a heartrending impact as Courage’s daughter, Kattrin. One of the strengths of While’s production is to unflinchingly articulate how war inevitably treats women and girls.
Nadine Higgin also gives a powerhouse performance as stripper-turned-revolutionary Yvette, wrapped in red as she belts her character’s life story angrily across the Globe in one of the play’s more memorable songs, as a khaki-clad brass band brings bouts of wild swagger or fleeting tenderness to the forsaken folks below. Zac Gvi’s music direction reflects the play’s jagged shards of humour.
Designer Takis turns the Globe’s stage into a rubbish dump, garish oil cans encircling one pillar, while chairs spill their inwards and characters are dressed in scraps. It’s a junkyard dystopia, with a pit into which dead bodies are tipped with as little ceremony as discarded bottles. Courage’s rickety cart, which she and her kids push in endless circles around the stage gradually morphs from food store to scavenged munitions outlet. There’s a compellingly bleak feeling of broken pantomime.
Given the play’s focus on ordinary people caught up in the actions of leaders safely out of harm’s way, While could probably make more of the Globe’s opportunity for audience interaction. But that’s a minor gripe about a production that’s full-blooded but never feels soft-soaped. It keeps a warped sense of vibrancy going until almost the end, before deftly introducing a fleeting moment of vulnerability that’s the nearest thing this broken world will get to a moment of grace before the war juggernaut staggers on. A whispering note of pain from Terry is a disarming gut punch that feels powerfully necessary.
