Mother Courage & Her Children - NT (Olivier) (Review)
Review by Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi
A YOUNG mute woman’s limp body catapults over the top of a roof, after being shot to death by soldiers. Her crime? She sought to raise a sleeping town with a drum – knowing nothing but war (she was born and died during an intense 30-year conflict) – so that they may arm themselves against an advancing army.
This was a moving scene buried in among the cold, hard, poetic play about war that is Mother Courage & Her Children. War looms large throughout the play, an angry deity unmerciful with the lives of the protagonists. It provides a means for them to survive and to prosper, but the catch is always death or suffering of some kind.
Bertolt Brecht wrote Mother Courage & Her Children on the eve of World War II and set it during the European 30-year war in the 1600s. But director Deborah Warner brings the play firmly into the present, shaping it to suit a public consciousness fed a daily dose of the suffering and politics of war.
War as a notion is embedded in contemporary life through a confounding mix of epic war films and graphic news reports from the front line.
In some ways, the sight of Mother Courage’s younger son’s bloodied body on stage isn’t something we haven’t seen before. Who can forget the bloodied, dusty bodies scattered across papers and TV screens after the latest bomb in Iraq?
But modern numbness is countered with noise, energy and live music – something people still respond to.
Musicians Duke Special and the band play their lonely, haunting sounds over the action as Mother Courage makes a good living from the war, but also loses her children one by one to it.
On occasion, Fiona Shaw, wonderfully engaging and feisty as Mother Courage, joins in defiantly belting out numbers, ecstatic at the business opportunities war has brought her.
Shaw is in good company; the entire performance is engaging and humorous. Mother Courage & Her Children is worth seeing on the basis of the entertaining acting alone.
And despite the darkness of the play, it’s full of comedy that’s delivered with perfect timing, particularly by Peter Gowen as the opportunistic chaplain.
Go and see Mother Courage & Her Children, it’s more than just a diatribe about the horrors of war. It forces us to look beyond the way we are taught to understand war and destroys all notions of good versus evil.