Review: Mother Courage And Her Children

Brecht’s character, Mother Courage, is not the only morally ambiguous merchant to have been resurrected by the National recently. Last year George Bernard Shaw’s arms dealer Undershaft took to the same stage in a revival of Major Barbara.

It is good to see them back. There would have been something wrong had we got this far into the current era of conflict without viewing today’s violent times through the prism of both these works.

Brecht’s prophetic play — for it was while in exile in 1939 that the German dramatist finished writing Mother Courage — has the urgency of a cautionary tale about it.

His eponymous matriarch, played here by a mesmerising Fiona Shaw, trudges with her goods wagon through war-torn 17th-century Europe making money but losing her children as she goes. The lesson being that in times of war, even a merchant’s loss outweighs the profits.

But if the reason for reviving these plays is at least partly to examine the nature of war waged today, I cannot get rid of the nagging feeling that the play which is most relevant to now, and to the particular condition of living in the 21st century while our country’s army fights and dies in remote and distant lands, has yet to be written.

There have been some bold attempts by playwright Simon Stephens, while the Tricycle Theatre’s Afghanistan season also looked at how what happens to people over there affects people over here — or fails to.

That said, even though circumstances of war change, the moral questions do not, and Tony Kushner’s new translation of Mother Courage, and Deborah Warner’s whirligig production with its modern dress and weaponry, feels very modern.

The bare-bones staging announces scenes and locations with home-made surtitles written on giant sheets lowered from the flies. Technicians with headsets stand aloof from the action until they are needed for a spot of prop-moving — in accordance with the Brechtian aim of revealing theatrical artifice instead of hiding it. Yet in the moments when grief strikes Shaw’s quick-witted Mother Courage, nothing could feel more real.

The moment where she pretends not to recognise the dead body of one of her sons so that the soldiers who killed him do not know of her connection, is devastating. Shaw delivers it with a series of heart-breaking expressions that simultaneously transmit light-hearted indifference to the soldiers, and utter desolation to the audience.

But not for the first time Warner has tried to convince us that her long-time actor/collaborator has the soul of rock star. Shaw enters the action atop Courage’s wagon like a magnificent Boadicea — which works very well — but then breaks into a strut with the first of her rock numbers — which does not.

The music is provided by the indie/folk group Duke Special and the Band who deliver some beautifully poignant songs when they are not fronted by Shaw pretending to be Rod Stewart.

Inevitably it is in the play’s wry observations about humanity where the play is at its most powerful. The exchange between Courage and the doting army Chaplin (Peter Gowan) if a fine example, revealing as it does that war is the inevitable product of human nature rather than a clash of ideals and causes.

There is peace enough even during war for the human species to thrive, says the Chaplin whose job is to persuade soldiers to go willingly to their deaths. “War satisfies all needs,” he blithely declares. But by the time Courage has lost her children she is no longer thriving, but barely surviving in a purgatory of Beckett-like bleakness.

Warner’s production cleverly reflects a war’s mad cycle of battle and calm. Moments of civility are punctuated with the sudden chaos and fear brought by the whooshes and explosions of incoming shells.

But while Brecht still has the power to grip and provoke, the play is no longer the revelatory lesson it once was. Which is not to say that Mother Courage is not worth reviving and watching.

I just wonder if an anti-war play with its generic lesson about the hellishness of conflict will make a blind bit of difference to the way we think about the wars being waged in our name now. (Tel: 020 7452 3000)