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. (He said the same about capitalism.) But his analysis doesn’t explain why rich men send their sons to the front or why some millionaires are pacifists. It doesn’t explain peace, either. This is a verdict dressed up as an enquiry. And Brecht is surprisingly judgmental, and wrong-headed, about his downtrodden chums from the underclass. He depicts peasants as dutiful donkeys whose commitment to any project, even their own death in battle, can be secured with strong drink.
That poor people misapprehend their own interests and need guidance from above is where Marxism talks the language of noblesse oblige and ‘the white man’s burden’. And what a shame poor old Brecht didn’t have a helpful co-writer to pop into the office once a week and set fire to half the script. Trimmed to 90 minutes, this dramatised sermon might have had some force. Musical effects have been added by an Irish songwriter, Duke Special, whose dreadlocked hairstyle makes him look as if his skull is giving birth to a tarantula. Special lives up to his name. His voice has a strange and twangily warm timbre, but the placement of his songs retards the sluggish progress of the action and undermines their effect.
Elsewhere the aesthetic is tirelessly ugly, shrill and perfunctory. The action is frequently overwhelmed by fighter jets and tedious detonations surging across the soundtrack. Costumes and decor have been entrusted to an acid casualty living on a landfill site. It’s junk, literally. The locations are represented by sheets scrawled with descriptions, ‘the General’s tent’, ‘outside a village’, ‘a cliff’. The soldiers wear army-surplus tat, the rest of the cast are in skipwear. A stylist has cabbed Fiona Shaw over to Lakeside and said, ‘Dress this bird up as a hippy chick.’ At the heart of this production there’s the self-satisfied conviction that hard work and talent are mutually exclusive. Striving for excellence proves you aren’t a genius. What a scruffy, wretched embarrassment. I’d rather have spent my three hours and ten minutes knitting, asleep or staring at the fourth plinth. If only I’d brought a puzzle.
The Duke of York’s has welcomed a very rum revival. Andrew Bovell’s 2000 play features a treacherous love quadrangle: two couples cheating on each other with each other. The dialogue is highly stylised and the four characters deliver identical lines in different contexts. It’s a clever effect, too clever really, and the author abandons it in favour of long narrative soliloquies. After the interval he ditches the quadrangle and introduces fresh characters and unrelated storylines. Eh? It’s like being asked by the maître d’, halfway through your main course, to move to a new table in a different restaurant. Somewhere in here there’s an interesting play, or half a play, about self-deception and emotional fulfilment but it’s wrecked by the writer’s ‘experimental’ (or ‘hopelessly inept’) stagecraft. What John Simm is doing in this is anyone’s guess. Maybe he’s on a daytime film shoot and wants something to do in the evening.
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