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Synopsis With war raging all around her, Mother Courage sells food and clothing to soldiers, switching allegiance when it suits her and striving to keep her business and children alive at all costs. Bloody battlefields are her marketplace, her wagon, her stall. Her remarkable and brutal story is told through humour and song; her story is one of choices and remains a powerful reminder of human resilience and loss in times of war. An epic masterpiece of one woman's survival. Running time 3hrs 10mins inclu. interval Part of Travelex £10 Season
Deborah Warner’s long-awaited modern dress production of Mother Courage and Her Children opened at the National’s Oliver Theatre last week (25 September 2009, previews from 9 September), starring Fiona Shaw in the title role.
Currently booking until 6 December, Bertolt Brecht’s anti-war epic runs to over three hours in Tony Kushner’s new translation, which is accompanied by live music from Duke Special, as well as recorded scene announcements from Gore Vidal, making his London stage debut.
The original press night was delayed by nine days and when critics finally saw the play last night, they emerged massively divided in opinion. Whatsonstage.com's Michael Coveney found Warner’s production “thrilling’, though several other reviewers suggested she had rather overegged the rock’n’roll aesthetic. And while Shaw was commended by some commentators, The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer called it “one of the embarrassing spectacles I’ve ever seen in a theatre”.
Nevertheless, Fiona Mountford of the Evening Standard and Michael Billington of the Guardian thought Shaw captured Mother Courage’s inherent contradictions. And there was praise all round for the supporting cast, in particular Stephen Kennedy as the chaplain, as well as for Duke Special - albeit faint from the pen of Charles Spencer, who called his “weary, bleary music ... the best thing in the show”.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (five stars) - “Any idea that 'boring old Brecht', as he is usually labelled these days by ignorant and condescending critics, will moulder in his grave while theatre disowns him is triumphantly shot to pieces in this thrilling production by Deborah Warner of one his greatest plays ... Shaw does not play the gnarled old tragic heroine of the Helene Weigel or Joan Littlewood variety, but a feisty, company cheerleader who is too obsessed with survival to pause and lament ... The performance is shot through with a vivid cynicism and a take-it-or-leave-it stagecraft that seems a great contemporary way of doing Brecht: an approach enhanced in rock concert lighting blasts designed by Jean Kalman, and a set by Tom Pye that is an aggregation of props, musical instruments, and the supporting cast of dross and flotsam.”
Michael Billington in The Guardian (four stars) - “The good thing about Deborah Warner's revival is that it frees Brecht's play from pious reverence and releases its dynamic energy. Even if Warner's production occasionally throws the baby out with the bathwater, it presents the play as a piece of living theatre ... Fiona Shaw captures all the contradictions of Brecht's protagonist: she is courageous and cowardly, philosophical and pragmatic. She shows that the character is aware of the cost of her business-first outlook: in the great scene where Courage is forced to deny knowledge of her dead son, Shaw's expressive features are engaged in a battle between feigned ignorance and tremulous emotion. At times, as when seen riding atop her wagon in a battle helmet, Shaw overdoes the jauntiness, but she never lets us forget that Courage is constantly torn between her maternal protectiveness and her bargaining instinct.”
Benedict Nightingale in The Times (three stars) - “Nothing is more climactic than the arrival of Fiona Shaw’s Mother Courage, that hyena of the battlefields ... at times she overemphasises Courage’s swaggering energy and resilience, and underplays what’s hard, grim, voracious and weather beaten in a character who loses three children to her belief that she can profit with impunity from the Thirty Years War. She can be raucous but also oddly fey and frolicsome, goosing a passing soldier or wiggling with glee at the prospect of gain. Shaw is a great actress, but she’s more fire and air than earth - and it shows ...Yet the supporting performers, especially Stephen Kennedy as the glum chaplain who becomes Courage’s potboy, are strong and Tony Kushner’s adaptation combines with Warner’s staging to catch war’s unpredictability, fever, ferocity - and perverse magnetism.”
Charles Spencer in The Telegraph (one star) - “Director Deborah Warner and actress Fiona Shaw ... have turned the play into a rock-and-roll circus. Shaw comes on to the Olivier Theatre stage in sunglasses and boho-chic threads like a cross between Mick Jagger and Madonna, strutting round the stage in feisty rock-chick style and singing abysmally. It is one of the most embarrassing spectacles I have ever seen in a theatre, a desperate ploy to make Brecht, the discredited old Marxist, seem relevant and modern ... Warner is also determined to be so hip it hurts, opening her production with white noise and the sounds of modern warfare, and wheeling on a folk-punk band led by someone called Duke Special, a white man with the silliest dreadlocks ... I have no doubt that some will claim to find all this compelling and describe the production as a telling commentary on Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the show struck me as merely idiotic, full of sound and gimmickry, and signifying almost nothing.”
Fiona Mountford in the Evening Standard (three stars) - “Doom-mongers will be disappointed, as this is a competent, confident, if ultimately underwhelming reading of one of the trickiest masterpieces of 20th-century theatre ... Shaw gives a lucid, earthy account of Brecht’s deliberate bundle of contradictions, extracting maximum value from Tony Kushner’s wry, witty translation but falling short of the role’s towering greatness. If she conveys the sense of gritty compromise needed to survive and even flourish in a world of bellicose men, she fails adequately to pinpoint the emotions of a woman who makes a living but loses her offspring ... The play makes for epic theatre in every sense of the term. Amidst its bagginess are moments of undisputed brilliance but Warner fails to differentiate her scenes sufficiently. The result is a cumulative, enervating blurring of focus that even memorable work from Charlotte Randle as the raddled prostitute Yvette and Sophie Stone as Courage’s dumb daughter Kattrin fails to prevent.”
Any idea that “boring old Brecht”, as he is usually labelled these days by ignorant and condescending critics, will moulder in his grave while theatre disowns him is triumphantly shot to pieces in this thrilling production by Deborah Warner of one his greatest plays.
The opening was delayed by several days, and some previews cancelled, or half-cancelled, while Stephen Kennedy took over the role of the Chaplain and the production team struggled to pull together a highly complicated technical show.
But it was worth the wait, and Mother Courage, translated by Tony Kushner, is an ideal addition to the Travelex £10 tickets scheme: it shows how war is conducted by those on the fringes of the action, picking up the pieces and scraping a living: it has a tremendous set of new songs by the American chart-topper Duke Special; and it rocks.
Fiona Shaw is a mercurial, frighteningly atavistic Mother Courage, no sign of a headscarf, pulling a huge canvas and steel caravan of a cart from city to battlefield with a Virgin Mary statue and three children who all ultimately perish. Nothing daunted, she continues on her way.
Shaw does not play the gnarled old tragic heroine of the Helene Weigel or Joan Littlewood variety, but a feisty, company cheerleader who is too obsessed with survival to pause and lament. Forced to identify one dead son, she wryly denies he is hers. When her mute daughter Kattrin (Sophie Stone) is brutally executed while warning a sleeping town of the next invasion, she more or less kicks away her corpse.
The performance is shot through with a vivid cynicism and a take-it-or-leave-it stagecraft that seems a great contemporary way of doing Brecht: an approach enhanced in rock concert lighting blasts designed by Jean Kalman, and a set by Tom Pye that is an aggregation of props, musical instruments, and the supporting cast of dross and flotsam.
These last include Charlotte Randle’s stridently affecting and voracious prostitute, Kennedy’s fine Chaplain, Martin Marquez’s sly, adventurous cook and Roger Sloman’s vicious lieutenant in the great eleventh scene that pulls the reality of war into tragic focus.
And there’s the bonus of the cracked, weary old voice of Gore Vidal - a friend of Fiona Shaw - reading Brecht’s scene headings and, on the first night, taking the stage to rise from his wheelchair and remind us, as if we needed reminding, that the war goes on…
Can't quite make up my mind on this one. I felt that some of the very modernist staging and the use of a rock n roll style was just arty pretencious nonsense but in fairness some of the sogs worked well and added a new dimension to the play. What can't be questioned is the acting, espceially from Fiona Shaw who gave a brilliant performance. Not my favourite Mother Courage but one definitely worth seeing - Paul Wallis
07 Dec 09
I agree that its not perfect but is this because of the production, the translation or simply that the play is uneven? That said if you go with an open mind I reckon you will see one of the best productions on at the moment, and an actress at the top of her game. - Lost in France
03 Nov 09
Unusual to see people leaving the theatre BEFORE the interval, but I don't blame them. Shaw who is such a great actress cannot sing or dance-she reminded me of Siouxsie Sue , except that the Banshees were much better musicians than this lot!
Also, surprisingly for the National, some of the secondary actors were poor.
I go to the NT a lot-I suppose I was due a stinker. - David hudson
29 Oct 09
Magnificent! Overwhelming! Transcends by far every production of this play I have seen, including those with Diana Rigg at the National and Lotte Lenya in California - Robert Cohen
25 Oct 09
Really enjoyed this, I am in my 60s and a great supporter of innovative site specific theatre Punchdrunk, Kneehigh and Wildworks to name but 3, It seems to me that many of the adverse reviews are from those who have preconceived ideas of how Brecht should be performed largely gleaned from previous productions. I think if theatre is to survive it cannot compete on the unequal playing field of realism with TV and Film, it has to find new and exiting ways to deliver the messages it contain, This was a brave attempt; Fiona Shaw was brilliant and moving and the evening memorabl and thought provoking which has become part of the criteria I use to judge theatre. - Deborah H
22 Oct 09
Could the music be any worse???!!! - Paul
13 Oct 09
I went to see this show as part of my 'A' Level drama course. Some people actually left during the interval; however I felt that the lighting, special effects, and acting in general were excellent. All of the people in my group felt that the music was terrible and really ruined the overall feel of the play. I understand that the idea of the music was to DISTRACT the audience from the play but the idea was NOT to make them hate it! Overall I liked the performance, however it would have been much better without the annoying man singing!! - James
13 Oct 09
Deborah Warner shoots another play in the head. Why does the NT keep giving her money to obscure texts? Half-baked, incoherent, shouty and dull. - addicted to theatre
13 Oct 09
This is great.
I'm not quite sure why there's such a marmite reaction to it, but in fairness, it won't be to everyones taste... so... err... then i do understand the marmite-ness to it..
I didn't think Fiona Shaw was that great, howver everyone who surrounded her was fantastic, especialy her daughter who (i've learned recently) is actualy profoundly deaf in real life, which added to the astonishment that she's so fabulous in this show!
Given Lars von trier's recent exploration of the 'Brechtian' idiom in film, this did feel a little bit like one of his... but staged (if that makes and sence). The whole thing is massive and it's a great use of the Olivier auditorium.. however.... the music is awfull.. really really awfull... Duke Special's terrible Rufus Wainright-ism's are bland and absolutly not what Deborah Warner seems to want to complete her rock staging... it's very odd that they choose him to do the music when the world is the nationals oyster!!
that said this is top top stuff!! - Cassox
08 Oct 09
Well 3.5 actually. Brecht’s epic story of an entrepreneurial woman struggling to eke out a living during war comes up surprisingly fresh and timeless in Deborah Warner’s production at the National. The contemporary relevance is left for the audience to uncover rather than spelled out patronisingly. The addition of contemporary music by on-stage singer Duke Special, the in-your-face design and the war soundscape all add much. There is however a huge problem in the pacing. It grabs your attention quickly then the first half outstays its welcome at almost 2 hours; pace returns in the second half, though not all the audience have returned! I can understand why she placed the interval at the (brief) outbreak of peace, but it results in an unevenness which is in danger of de-railing the show. Fiona Shaw is completely at home in the role, with excellent support from Sophie Stone as her mute daughter, Harry Melling & Clifford Samuel as her sons, Peter Gowan as the Chaplain, Charlotte Randle as Yvette and Martin Marquez as the cook. - Gareth James
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