Mother Courage and Her Children reviews: The Globe shows Brecht is just as relevant as ever

"Brecht’s anti-war play can be daunting – but this staging is a gripping triumph."

“The Globe’s first ever foray into the German playwright’s work has two glorious weapons in its (pacifist) arsenal. The first is Anna Jordan’s astute and nimble adaptation and the second is artistic director Michelle Terry triumphing in the towering central role.”

“Without hammering home their point, Jordan and director Elle While reflect uncompromising home truths back at the conflict-ravaged world of 2026.”

“As we note the musicians in the gallery dressed in combat fatigues, we hear of a grindingly abstract conflict being fought by armies named after assorted colours.”

“Terry knows exactly how to play this wraparound space so as to draw in all spectators and her command is a delight to watch. In a show-stopping number at the end of the first half, Courage sings her life story and the look of theatrical faux-surprise on Terry’s face when the band starts up is cherishable."

"Anna Jordan’s new translation and Michelle Terry’s lovable performance bring out the humanity of a woman doing what’s necessary to keep herself and her family alive."

“It is human, moving and funny. The distance closes and the production becomes devastating in its most savage moments, when Mother Courage loses her children, one by one.”

“In director Elle While’s powerful production, the emotional drama is tightly controlled, flaring up momentarily.”

“Michelle Terry as Courage is a calculating hustler with few soft edges – a cross between a musical hall entertainer, a Victorian waif and the Wife of Bath.”

“James Maloney’s compositions also create distance, with a jazz-infused musicality that suggests the war is a horrible kind of cabaret. Rollicking upbeat songs create a powerful kind of dissonance between sound and subject matter, with characters booming out big numbers in abject situations.”

“The play was originally set in the 17th century, during the thirty years’ war, and premiered at the start of the second world war. Here, its location seems timeless yet contemporary, with sweary characters who look and sound of our time. Armies are defined by colours, to make war seem all the more senseless and absurd. They exist in a featureless world, with a mass grave around takis’s stage design, into which bodies are thrown.”

“The production does full justice in its portrait of complicated, imperfect and doggedly hopeful motherhood, too.”

"Michelle Terry is winning in the title role in this canny, timely production of Brecht’s anti-war play."

“Anna Jordan’s adaptation is not set during any particular conflict, time or territory. And in Elle While’s production – which marks the first time a work by the forefather of Epic theatre has been staged at this address – the drama feels both impersonal and uncannily familiar.”

“[Mother Courage is ] played by Globe chief Michelle Terry, whose superpower is her rare ability to slip into any part and seem born to play it – and this really is a winning turn. Utterly charming and manically chipper, her MC is a glass-half-full type who knows how to turn a penny, even in this savage environment.”

“Emily Lim’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, currently running in tandem at this venue, bonds actors and spectators through heaps of light-hearted audience participation. Here, the atmosphere is inverted as loud shots of gunfire make the crowd scream and stand back.”

“Bluesy, folky songs, composed by James Maloney, lend the pain and suffering some heart.”

“As this sorry story progresses, its anti-war message grows louder, and is summed up best in a speech by Ferdy Roberts’ softly commanding Minister. He points out that the war cannot end because of money – if it did, the powers-that-be would have to find jobs, housing and education for their people. The artifice of the play vanishes, and we’re left staring at an enduring, terrible truth.”

Quotes:

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“Hot on the heels of the RSC’s revival of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, comes director Elle While’s engrossing production of Mother Courage which also features a coruscating central performance, here by Michelle Terry as the indomitable matron of the title.”

“There’s a grim universality about the setting by takis which coats one of the Globe’s ornate pillars in battered oil cans and hides its back balconies in tattered fabric of the different colours of the competing factions. A long ramp from the front of the stage, gives Courage somewhere to drag her cart, as she traipses on endlessly, profiteering from the conflict. It also creates a pit, full of rubbish, where bodies are unceremoniously jettisoned.”

“At the heart of it all is Terry, coarse, funny, shocking. She commands the space as she wheels and deals, sharp-eyed in search of a quick buck, a profit. She claims she is doing it all to survive, but Terry is good at communicating how alive it makes her feel – her sense that she is on top in a world of men is part of her motivation.”

“There’s terrific support too from Ferdy Roberts as the lascivious, morally ambivalent Minister, Nadine Higgin as Yvette, a vivacious sex worker and revolutionary, just as determined as Courage and rather more political, and Max Runham as the wry narrator, constantly placing the action and drawing the audience into each scene.”

“James Maloney’s jazzily dissonant score adds another level of depth, providing narrative songs that are both cynical and occasionally tender.”

“In all, the achievement of the production is to make Brecht’s characters and their lives both symbolic and real; in the collective space of the Globe his warnings about capitalism, and elites who manipulate the working man for their own personal gain ring uncannily true.”

“The lumbering version of Mother Courage and Her Children at Shakespeare’s Globe in London is not going to do much to dispel Brecht’s reputation for being didactic.”

“While Michelle Terry, the venue’s artistic director, is suitably cussed in the title role, Elle While’s production trundles along like the cart that the grizzled trader and her brood push round and round the stage.”

“Gunshots ring out, and you immediately think of Ukraine when drones are mentioned. This is a conflict, nevertheless, between combatants vaguely defined by the colour of their uniforms and the grid squares that they are fighting over.”

“In the programme notes, Jordan talks of researching “disaster politics” and bringing activism to the stage, but you’re still left with a drama that presses home the same grim message at length.”

“It doesn’t help that this production, designed by takis, lacks visual flair. A battered sofa dominates one side of the stage; a walkway that projects into the space normally occupied by groundlings provides room for a pit into which corpses are unceremoniously tipped from time to time.”

“Ferdy Roberts brings fragility to the Minister, and Nadine Higgin, clad in eye-burning red, is charismatic as Yvette, the young woman who happily sells her body to make a living.”

“Higgin is the only cast member to make an impression on Brecht’s lyrics, with music composed by James Maloney, which punctuate the evening. She really does know how to project her voice to the rooftops. The other numbers are tepid.”