Ramshackle muddle

Mother Courage and Her Children
Olivier

Speaking in Tongues
Duke of York’s

Mother Courage, Brecht’s saga of conflict and suffering, is set during the Thirty Years’ War. The title character is a maternal archetype who ekes out a perilous existence selling provisions to the warring factions and chasing off the recruiting sergeants who want to lure her children into the army. Deborah Warner’s wrong-century production announces its intentions early. At curtain-up we know nothing of Courage except that she has ‘lost a son’. And here she comes, aboard her famous cart, wearing sunglasses, bawling into a microphone while cavorting to the sound of an on-stage rock band like the saddest groin-thrusting granny at Glastonbury. No room here for psychological coherence, pathos or grandeur. Just lots of energetic silliness.

Fiona Shaw, who is capable of suggesting virtually any emotional effect on stage, keeps her performance at sitcom level and plays Courage as a charming Irish loony. Never flagging for one moment, she manages to bind together this monumental patchwork of chitchat, bloodshed and moral posturing. That the show is a ramshackle war-porn muddle is chiefly Brecht’s fault but Warner has made a handsome contribution too. Brecht’s treatment is epic, or episodic, rather than dramatic. And epic isn’t good. Epic is a dangerous genre to put on stage because it lacks the propulsive momentum of drama. It’s the difference between building a fire and lighting a fire.

Brecht takes a fascinating question — why humans fight wars — and examines it selectively by focusing on some of war’s unappetising consequences. To discover why Jeffrey Dahmer ate his victims you need to do more than inspect the contents of his stomach. And Brecht loads the terms of the debate in favour of his conclusion that war is a conspiracy of the rich against the poor.