Mother Courage and Her Children
Stratford Circus, London

Stephen Nash

I first saw a performance of Mother Courage and Her Children at the National Theatre in 1993. The performance was true to the play. Ten years on and the Graeae Theatre Company, using all disabled actors, has put on a quite different play.

It is set during the Thirty Years War that blighted central Europe from 1618 to 1648. Mother Courage adapts to the War society and thrives commercially within its terms. But ultimately there is overwhelming tragedy here because whatever success she has is at the expense of everyone's humanity. The play has no lessons to teach because war cannot teach anything of value. Or as Brecht himself put it 'Misfortune in itself is a poor teacher'. Mother Courage's' drive for survival in extraordinary times creates a perverted morality and it is the exploration of this drive that gives the play both its tragedy and its humour.

There are separate and interlinked issues at stake in this difficult interpretation of the play. Firstly there is the issue of an all-disabled cast. While you can sympathise with the desire to open up opportunities for the disabled in what must have been a closed shop to many in the past you have to measure this against the impact on the play. For me when I go to the theatre I am witnessing the creative fusion of writer and director in bringing out the best of the original work. The actors must not get in the way of this otherwise you are distracted. It will always be harder for a disabled actor to transcend their disability and provide something new to the role.

An example of this is Christopher Reeve in the remake of Rear Window. Compare his performance with that of James Stewart in the original. Both bring suspense to the role as you would expect in a Hitchcock film but it is Stewart with his greater range of emotions who brings the most to the part. Ultimately Reeves performance is remembered for the courage of the actor himself. Again a distraction from the work itself. Having said all of that, Liz Carr who played Mother Courage was excellent and came very close to doing justice to the part. Carr allowed the character as conceived by Brecht to speak for herself.

The second issue in the play is the attempt to relate the issues raised in the play to the contemporary world. The moral chaos of war is paralleled in the moral uncertainties of today. The world of consumerism and marketing has left individual identity in pieces, and so Mother Courage with her survivalist morality is again a 'success'.

The production uses a lot of technology to make this point with news broadcasts cheerfully boasting of rising living standards in a world where corporate greed has triumphed. While this picture of an alienated world may be familiar to us unfortunately it is based on too much caricature to ring true and only adds to a sense of distraction from the play.

Brecht wisely uses real historical events as a backdrop to the play in order to bring out the tragedy of Mother Courage, whereas in this production we are left with a montage of news items that are based around fictional events. The musical interludes, while entertaining and within the Brechtian tradition add little to our enlightenment. Chumba Wumba and physicality are no substitute for the wordplay of the script.

Finally what of the play itself as conceived by Brecht? I'm sure he would welcome all new innovations of his work, which can bring it alive for fresh audiences. And yet the production fails to do this. While we still end with Mother Courage triumphant and yet morally destroyed we can't quite see how she reached this point. There is too much hidden by technological distractions and a tortuous modern analogy. To do justice to Mother Courage, it has to be played out in a war setting. It is only in a world built around war that such a moral collapse can be investigated.

The interplay of technology, contemporary issues and the use of an all disabled cast raise interesting issues in their own right, and I can see their future within a context of theatre/workshop/art galleries, but they do not suit pure theatre where the written word has to be paramount.

Touring till 26 July