A never-ending odyssey of doom made digestible
Mother Courage and Her Children Royal Exchange, Manchester ★★★
The heart invariably sinks at the prospect of Brecht’s Mother
Courage, a three-hour, pedagogic slog that unflinchingly lays bare the unholy alliance between capitalism and the business of war. At least Anna Jordan’s punky new adaptation comes in at two hours 20 and makes light, if sometimes scrappy, work of a story that never sits still, as the entrepreneurial Mother Courage chases the profits to be made from the Thirty Years War, here reimagined as a nameless conflict set during the 2080s, at the eventual cost of all three of her children.
Former Coronation Street regular Julie Hesmondhalgh returns to this venue after a tremendous performance in Wit in 2016, in which she played a poetry lecturer dying from ovarian cancer. Grit and brawn run through this actress’s DNA yet initially her Courage is insouciant and flippant, flirty even. She’s a hustler, a woman on the make, eyes gleaming in pursuit as she drags her children and her battered ice cream van stocked with tinned food and booze (the cheerful jingle is a nice ironic touch) after the army through the interminable muddy wastelands. Money for her is like a drug, and her grubby desire for it borders on psychosis: “It’s all about the moolah,” she brags. Later she stands aloft in a fur coat while a young mother clutching her baby lies dying at her feet.
Jordan’s futuristic setting (scantily articulated as a ravaged, technologically depleted continent across which red and blue armies roam in seemingly perpetual conflict) doesn’t, in the end, add a great deal: Brecht’s point about the extreme morally expedient choices war forces upon those caught up in it remains the same, wherever it is set. At times it even creates problems: to replace the Catholic attack on a sleeping Protestant town with a gas attack on a refugee camp, as Jordan does here, doesn’t make much sense; sleeping Protestants may have been caught by surprise, but refugees stand little chance against gas whether asleep or awake. Yet that scene still yields the play’s most devastating moment – the sacrificial death of Courage’s mute daughter Kattrin, played with heart-rending precision by deaf actress Rose Ayling-ellis.
There’s detailed work too from Hedydd Dylan as the prostitute Yvette and Kevin Mcmonagle as the affable cynic Minister. Hesmondhalgh stops a mite short of the tour de force performance you suspect she is capable of, while Amy Hodge’s production, featuring an original electro-folk score by James Fortune, never feels entirely confident. But Brecht’s point, that war makes transactional victims of us all, still rings clear.
Until Mar 2. Tickets: 0161 833 9833; royalexchange.co.uk