FringeReview UK 2026
Mother Courage and Her Children
Shakespeare’s Globe
Genre: Adaptation, classical, Comedic, Contemporary, Costume, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Political, Theatre, Tragedy, Translation
Venue: Shakespeare’s Globe
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
The Globe’s discovered that plays set in the seventeenth century seem as at home as real seventeenth century plays. Now comes Brecht’s 1939-1940 play Mother Courage and Her Children in Anna Jordan’s translation, first performed in 2019 at the Royal Exchange. Featuring Michelle Terry as Mother Courage herself, it’s directed at the Globe by Elle While till June 27.
Brecht’s ferocious message that those who seek profit from war are often its victims too is driven home in the weight of dropped bodies, and Terry’s outstanding performance.
Review
The Globe’s discovered that plays set in the seventeenth century seem as at home as real seventeenth century plays. Last year The Crucible with its palisades and palpable fronter edge arrived. Now comes Brecht’s 1939-1940 play Mother Courage and Her Children in Anna Jordan’s translation, first performed in 2019 at the Royal Exchange. Featuring Michelle Terry as Mother Courage herself, it’s directed at the Globe by Elle While till June 27.
It’s a production that centres Terry’s performance for all the right reasons, and allows the bleached wood of the Globe to sprawl desolation with a scurf of bric-a-brac and the distressed family cart lugged round and round. Takis’ set features a giant maw just behind the augmented curved stage-thrust: where bodies, real and rag-doll-like, are dropped after death.
“This version… is more sprightly than many other translations” Jordan claims. If a bit immodest, she’s not wrong: her work as poet chimes with Brecht’s energy and gravelly metaphoric leaps. Though closely following the 1624-36 sequence of years but not its chronology, Jordan has kept Brecht’s epic feel but stripped out the placards, and indeed all references to the Thirty Years’ War. Set in a series of grid areas and Purple and Blue armies, with latterly Orange insurgents, this epoch becomes not a thirty-year exhaustion but a forever war. It underscores Mother Courage’s relevance, though – only very slightly – fuzzes its outline and deadly historic chronicle.
Most of all though Jordan’s allowed the sheer narrative to dominate, and the emotions to land. Even more than in 2019, as she relates, she’s backgrounded her original futuristic dystopias and allowed low-tech with a few guns, a drone and missile hit and lastly, a gas attack with sirens going off directly behind the audience. Fly Davies’ fatigued and motley costumes are lit up with scrappy booty (mainly in character Yvette’s splash of scarlet). Or textured with Terry’s slashed and faded goth-wear. Witnessing the effects of wars ourselves we don’t need to imagine too much: the stark storytelling focus is even more impressive.
James Maloney’s songs and musical interludes distantly recall Kurt Weill in their bluesy and gritty jazz feel. Maloney acknowledges skirting the pull of Paul Dessau who wrote a famous Courage score. If anything there’s a touch of Brecht’s later collaborator Hans Eisler, whose take on war erupted in parodic march-songs. But Maloney’s punchy score refuses obvious militarism, or parody.
Courage wants to profit from the war and follows it with her canteen, selling to troops at whatever cost. “In the business of war, every victory costs something.” Courage’s persistence and wit make you root for her: despite this meaning she loses not something but nearly everything. As the Sergeant says: “You want the war to work for you? You’ve got to feed it something too.” The transactional equivalence of a meat-grinder knurls underneath and it shows Jordan’s punchy verse often scorches the message home.
Brecht tried to dehumanise Courage, slightly appalled at how relatable she is. He failed because his imagination overruled him. Accordingly Terry’s Courage is raucous, timing her put-downs to perfection, occasionally cruel and able to slap nearly everyone, sometimes verbally. Her Courage’s vulnerability though carries actors in waves of silence, confronting a body, or singing a lullaby. It’s this capacity to drop her brazen energy at moments, when Courage’s guard falls away, that provides several of the production’s most rending moments. Brecht might not have condoned too much of this, but it’s our Mother Courage now. And his ferocious message that those who seek profit from war are often its victims too is driven home in the weight of dropped bodies, and Terry’s outstanding performance.
Max Runham’s Narrator seems to carry the years. He’s a skirling presence, a hard-bitten commentator, a wearied ringmaster for war. Trieve Blackwood-Cambridge’s Sergeant and his other roles are some of the clearest-spoken (like Terry and Ferdy Roberts) of the production: he brings heft, even menace when required. It’s an impressive performance, as is his brief (and very different) role as a desolate soldier arguing faith with the Minister. As Sergeant he’s paired to Keaton Guimaraes-Tolley’s wily Recruiting Officer, who seems to have come up from the ranks and knows how to lure Eilif.
Vinnie Heaven’s Eiliff is less-self-delighting in Heaven’s performance and Jordan’s text: there’s less of the overreach in some; his fall seems less spectacular. He’s far more a sparky boy out of his depth, his youth emphasised. Rawaed Asde’s younger and ‘simple’ Swiss Cheese seems paradoxically a little more articulate. They’re levelled in this productions as variants on the same meat-grinding theme.
It’s Rachelle Diedricks’ Kattrin who compels attention here. Making a choreographic dance of distress, mouthing and expressive in everything she does, she’s also even nearer the heart of the play. Her frantic attempts to warn in particular are heartrending, threatening to break out vocally, and on occasion Diedricks looses anguished cries. Her darting to warn people of a gas attack is frantic and selfless: someone perhaps with nothing to lose.
Ferdy Roberts’ Minister comes on like a Velasquez portrait and morphs into Rooster Byron: he radiates a mix of whingy doubt and self-serving, pretending it’s noble. Nicolas Tennant’s querulous Chef is a blunter match, always outbid by Courage. Yet both are fascinated and drawn by Courage’s energy, which Terry makes rivetingly plausible.
Nadine Higgin’s warm Yvette is a riotous analogue to Terry’s Courage; she turns in a joyously amped performance, lighting the drab stage like a fairground come to a desert: visually the grey life around her vibrates in a blaze of red. She trails at certain points Sarita Gaboney and Ayla Wheatley, whose gestures to the audience as they circle make the nearest to any interaction. It’s striking that like The Crucible, this Courage is as distanced as Brecht would wish. Like Roberts and Tennant’s characters, Yvette offers Courage a way out; but Courage has a human flaw: she’s a mother too.
Simon Scardifield’s laddish general is succeeded by a brutish Orange Sergeant, an insurgent, signalling a new stage of breakdown and anarchy. His final scene once again involves Daniel Rainford’s put-upon soldier frightened into an act of barbarity. Two children alternate a brief role: Eden River-Coleman or Sienna-Rae Kenna-Braithwaite.
A palpably human but also to a degree Brechtian vision, this production begs Jordan’s and Maloney’s question: how might Brecht adapt this in 2026? More timely now than Jordan’s previous outing in 2019 – indeed at any time since Mother Courage was written 87 years ago – this is the production and moment to test its relevance. As Brecht might spit out: Haven’t we heard the terrible news?
Musicians: Composer James Maloney, Woodwind (job share) Tomas challenger, Trumpet Miguel Gorodi, MD/T Woodwind (job share) Zac Gvi, Percussion Zands Duggan, Woodwind Sarah Homer, Tuba Hanna Mbuya.
Assistant Director Samuel Tracey,
Fight & Intimacy Director Rachel Bown-Williams for RC-Annie
Scenic Artists Rose Bailey, Emily Carne, Costume Supervisor Karen Hopkinson, Voice and Text Nia Lynn, Production Manager Hattie Wheeler. Costume Makers Katy Clark, Julia Saunders.
Stage Managers Anna-Mari Casson, Lauren Patman, (for TwoCan Stage Manage), DSM Sophie Johnson, ASM Alex Alexander, Stage Management Placement Caitlin Wills.
Globe Associate – Movement Glynn MacDonald, Head of Voice Tess Dignan, Head of Production Wills, Head of Stage Bryan Paterson, Head of Wigs, Hair and Make-up Gilly Church, Head of Wardrobe Emma Lucy-Hughes, Head of Company Management Marion Marrs, Head of Props Emma Hughes, Casting Becky Paris CDG. Producer Tamsin Mehta.
