REVIEW: MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN, The National Theatre, October 27 2009

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hunderd years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

That's Orson Wells as Harry Lime in The Third Man, but it's a sentiment about the impact of war and peace on creativity that Mother Courage would recognise, as she pulls her wagon through Europe following its grim Thirty Years' War (1618 - 1648) making a living selling provisions to its combatants, changing from Protestant to Catholic as suits (business) conditions.

With banners to introduce each scene, costume changes on stage and a band joining the actors, Deborah Warner's interpretation of Tony Kushner's new, very 21st century, translation of Bertholt Brecht's warning to the future, is true to the conventions of epic theatre. However, such is the power of the script and the force of the acting, that people around me were flinching at the violence and close to tears as Mother Courage's children suffer as casualties of her ambition. The audience is given much to think about (as Brecht intended) but not at the expense of emotional connection with the characters.

Fiona Shaw conveys the Mother Courage's energy in the amoral pursuit of profit in wartime with a performance that shows just enough vulnerability to reveal the mother behind the ruthless deal-maker. Pulling her wagon, she sells provisions to the troops and is smart enough (so she thinks) to stay close enough to the slaughter to benefit from its destruction of peacetime life, while distant enough to avoid the risks of direct involvement - she sells to anyone with money to pay and chooses not to think too hard about the consequences. It is left to her children, a bloodlusting soldier, an honest regimental paymaster and a mute waif of a daughter, to pay the price for their mother's hubris. Although Ms Shaw has all the best lines (and they are very funny indeed) there are great turns from Stephen Kennedy as a nervous chaplain and Martin Marquez as a world-weary cook to keep this blackest of comedies bubbling. Throughout the play, Duke Special and his band offer a commentary on the action with songs played on a variety of conventional and unconventional instruments with stagehands endearingly dancing at the back of the set.

Brecht's enduring triumph, seventy years on from writing the play, is in his realising of his aim to make the audience think about the subject. It's impossible not to wince at how clearly Brecht foresaw the early 21st century's adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq, with contractors following close behind soldiers, hoovering up US Government money to service a static war as the politicians rattle sabres towards Iran. The costumes, accents and language used in this production do not offer an easy hook for the audience to locate the actual time in which the play's events take place, but, of course, they have always happened and always will, and thus Brecht's key point is made by this dramatic tour-de-force.

 

Mother Courage continues at The National Theatre, London through November and December.

 

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