London Theatre News & Reviews

The Reviews are in for Mother Courage and Her Children

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Shakespeare’s Globe welcomes revolutionary playwright Brecht to the stage for the very first time with a new production of his anti-war masterpiece, Mother Courage and Her Children.

Filled with live music, biting humour and raw determination, this modern staging of a classic protest piece, translated by Yen playwright Anna Jordan, asks urgent questions about survival, capitalism and complicity..

The reviews are in:

"The Globe's brilliant new production of Mother Courage and Her Children feels topical in today’s conflict-ravaged world. Brecht’s anti-war play can be daunting – but this staging is a gripping triumph." ★★★★ (The Telegraph).

"Even without Anna Jordan’s abrasive contemporary translation, Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 tale of a wartime profiteer would seem depressingly relevant. This staging by Elle While, the first for one of the German writer’s plays at the Globe, sits so securely in the wooden auditorium and communes so directly with the audience you feel the place could have been built for him." ★★★★ (The Standard).

"Michelle Terry, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, takes on one of theatre’s great female roles in Jordan’s translation of Brecht’s coruscating condemnation of the soul-destroying endlessness of warfare." ★★★★ (Time Out).

"It feels both impersonal and uncannily familiar." ★★★★ (The Stage).

"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.." ★★★ (Everything Theatre).

"It doesn’t help that this production, designed by takis, lacks visual flair. A battered sofa dominates one side of the stage; a walkway that projects into the space normally occupied by groundlings provides room for a pit into which corpses are unceremoniously tipped from time to time." ★★ (Sunday Times).

"James Maloney’s compositions also create distance, with a jazz-infused musicality that suggests the war is a horrible kind of cabaret. Rollicking upbeat songs create a powerful kind of dissonance between sound and subject matter, with characters booming out big numbers in abject situations." ★★★★ (The Guardian).

"This is not an easy piece of theatre to watch. It’s a bold, brave piece of programming that reaffirms Terry’s inspired leadership as an actor and artistic director. Trivial though it may sound to observe, if only the singing had been uniformly strong, this production would have been astonishing. As it is, it’s a robustly provocative piece that sends you back to the foreign news with gritted teeth and a broken heart." ★★★ (The Arts Desk).

Overall: ★★★½

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