Mother Courage and Her Children

Robyn Nevin returns to the play she directed in 2006 – but this time in the leading role. By Dee Jefferson

Whatever you do in the theatre, it’s hard to surpass the power of a great actor in a great role in a great play. All three come together this month in Belvoir’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by Eamon Flack and starring Robyn Nevin as the difficult heroine.

One of the most powerful anti-war and anti-capitalist plays of all time, and Brecht’s best-known work, Mother Courage follows a woman who buys, sells and bargains her way through a war-torn landscape.

Flack cast Nevin after directing her in Belvoir’s 2013 production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, where she played long-suffering widow and Mormon mother Hannah Pitt. He points to a thread of “tough and funny women battling the entire world” that runs through Nevin’s repertoire. Anna Fierling – Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage’ – was an obvious missing link.

Flack first thought about the work seriously while working on Angels, for which Mother Courage is an antecedent. Ultimately, however, he came to the work tangentially: “I was wanting to do a show that was somehow or other about globalisation – a theme that’s rarely tackled on stage, but is the most basic circumstance of the modern world – but wanting to start with a great play, rather than a new one,” he says. “I was looking for something that was about chaos and economics and unstable worlds, but that also had great theatricality and theatrical pleasure in it. It was quite a sudden idea, that a whole lot of these things might align in Mother Courage.”

Belvoir St Theatre 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills 2010. 02 9699 3444. belvoir.com. au. Tue 6.30pm; Wed-Fri 8pm; Sat 2pm & 8pm; Sun 5pm. $39-$72. Jun 6-Jul 26.