Review: Mother Courage and Her Children, Shakespeare’s Globe

It’s no mean feat to stage one of theatre’s best-known works in a venue almost certainly not designed with it in mind, but Shakespeare’s Globe under Michelle Terry (who also stars here as Mother Courage herself) make a commendable effort in going against the grain in an enthusiastic, if flawed, re-imagining of Bertolt Brecht’s famous play.

We follow Courage through Brecht’s text as she and her three children (played by Rachelle Diedricks, Rawaed Asde and Vinnie Heaven) wander from battlefield to battlefield and do their best to survive and thrive against the backdrop of a seemingly endless war. The themes and horror on display are as relevant today as ever, and a strong effort is made across the show’s design to adapt the original 17th century setting into the modern era full of tracksuit costumes and familiar household products offered for sale by Courage and her ever-present cart.

Terry embodies the rough affection of Mother Courage well and easily taps into the coarse wisdom that her weary matriarch dispenses so adeptly. Less successful however is her handling of some of the more vulnerable, tender moments when Courage’s facade drops and the war she so often seems to be master of robs her of something precious. Here Terry can slip into a kind of melodrama, an over exuberance that often spoils the moment, intentionally or not by director Elle While it’s hard to say.

What is quite intentional is the significant tinkering that’s been done with the script, with some very mixed results. The more contemporary setting for the action of the play allows for references to modern technologies such as drones, but accompanying this is the unusual decision to have the nations at war and the locations used in the original text replaced by abstract references to ‘grids’ and ‘squares’ over which armies identified only by their primary colour of ‘blue’, ‘purple’ and ‘orange’ fight over.

This change may have been done to make the script itself more Brechtian and abstract, with the intention that it would help the play be more relevant to the modern day, but precisely the opposite effect is achieved as the once grounded action of the play becomes difficult to relate to anything. This deviation from Brecht’s original, even if it seeks to follow his own artistic principles, feels misguided.

Together these elements combine to make for a theatrical experiment that finds some novelty in creative risks, but not enough to make the production feel truly insightful or a knockout. Perhaps with more risks, more life, it could have gotten there.

Directed by Elle While
Written by Bertolt Brecht
Composed by James Maloney 
Costume Supervisor Karen Hopkinson
Design by takis
Fight and Intimacy Direction: Rachel Bown-Williams of RC-Annie
Movement Director and Choreography by Anna Morrissey and Lucy Cullingford
Translation by Anna Jordan

Mother Courage and Her Children runs at Shakespeare’s Globe until Saturday 27 June.