I never imagined Brecht could be such a perfect match for the Globe. Thinking of recent productions of Mother Courage and Her Children, you may immediately recall Armin Petras’s (2019) minimalist, yet ultimately sublime sensation, as if Paul Dessau had actually written his score for it. Or, more recently, Oliver Frljić’s bold take at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, where Mother Courage is no longer a single character but an ensemble to portray the collective mother images shaped and devastated by war.
If you get used to the artistic and aesthetic language of those European productions, this Globe production, directed by Elle While with music by James Maloney, feels bold and subversive by contrast. In a way, it is strikingly Shakespearean: a third-person narrator (Max Runham) partially belongs to the narrative, the balcony consort, Michelle Terry’s Mother Courage, who almost has the quick wit similar to Mistress Quickly, only bitterer, harsher and more hysterical, and in certain scenes, Ferdy Roberts’s Minister is just a sadder version of John Falstaff.
Courage’s wooden cart feels seventeenth-century; in the meantime she makes and sells burgers with a stainless-steel burger flipper. This blend feels like a fusion of the Globe’s “Original Practices” and “free-hand” approaches explored years ago that easily connects three wars at once: in the text, in Brecht’s own time, and those very ones still carrying on in our own world.
But in nature, the production is Brechtian especially for its non-representational aesthetics: the shared light where audiences and actors can see each other; their laughter is not only the reaction, but part of it; even the fussy sounds of the planes overhead form part of it, adding war-time nerves to the atmosphere. On this stage, Brecht’s songs – famously understood as an alienation device – are never an interruption or suspension, but seamlessly infused into the theatrical whole.
Both are aesthetics that do not require you to forget you are in a theatre. Every minute you still have the awareness of your own presence and your surroundings, but it does not in any way diminish the “reality” onstage: Kattrin’s (Rachelle Diedericks) rage, Swiss Cheese’s (Rawaed Asde) ignorance, Eilif’s (Vinnie Heaven) swagger, and of course, Mother Courage’s grief. They are realer than the real. You are still scared and frightened, each time there’s a gunshot, even when knowing perfectly well that it’s “fake” and fictional. For me, alienation never means detachment, but always a liminal space between the two worlds.
In this production, the atrocities of war grows from the inside of daily life. What is more frightening is that the civilian “everydayness” of war isn’t about facing corpses, bullets, and injuries 24/7, but is inseparable from laughter, tears, lust and merriment. Upon triviality not universalised suffering, Mother Courage is so destroyed and hysterical because she shuttles in between too many times. Maloney’s jazz-rock fusion may feel slightly cheesy at times, but it is exactly that cheesiness of normal daily life, in the name of hope, that eventually pulls her down.
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