Mother Courage at Shakespeare’s Globe – review

You’ve got to hand it to Bertolt Brecht. He may be gloomy, but he was prescient. As the years pass his singing in times of darkness stays just as relevant as it was in his lifetime.

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.

It makes formidable use of the Globe’s communal space becoming, in Anna Jordan’s expletive-spattered contemporary adaptation, a searing indictment of war, violence and its effects on the human spirit.  

Brecht wrote the play about the Thirty Years War which ravaged Europe in the 17th century, and it was produced on the eve of the Second World War which brought its own devastation. Jordan’s version is set in another endless war, the wars of today and the future, where the world is divided into grids, and factions known only by the names of colours, grapple for “territory, food, fuel and future.”

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 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.

As, one by one, she loses her children to the sheer brutal logic of the endless round, Terry also beautifully conveys how her soul starts to shrivel, how each blow strips away her humanity so that her hilarity becomes forced, a mask of feelings that she cannot afford to show. Her essential selfishness is contrasted with her speechless daughter’s Kattrin’s instinctive altruism: she seeks to help the wounded, and her final act of sacrifice is profoundly moving in Rachelle Diedericks’ wounded performance.

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 as when Courage sings with her son Eilif (Vinnie Heaven).  Terry turns a narrative patter song that describes her character’s meeting with a “talkative blue-tit” into a scabrously humorous monologue.

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.