Mother Courage and Her Children at the Globe Theatre

Neil Dowden on the South Bank
★★★★☆
18 May 2026

Bertolt Brecht is usurping Shakespeare in the two places most associated with the Bard, with the RSC’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon now joined by Mother Courage and Her Children at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank. It’s the first time Brecht has been performed at Shakespeare’s Globe (following on from its production of another twentieth-century classic last summer, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible). And Elle While’s rumbustious, crowd-involving staging shows that this satirical epic saturated with songs and music is well suited to the communal open-air venue.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Brecht wrote Mother Courage in 1939 as the world descended into war, but he set it during the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century to gain historical perspective and emotional distance. However, Anna Jordan’s version of the play moves it into the twenty-first century. When it was first produced in 2019 at the Royal Exchange, Manchester (with Julie Hesmondhalgh in the title role), it was set in a distant dystopian future, but at the Globe that future is now. Rather than a post-EU, conflict-riven Europe, this show reflects the post-2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (including mention of drones) even if it is not specified.

Mother Courage is of course an excoriating satire on the pointless cruelty of war in which brutalized people become brutal, but it also satirizes capitalism – in fact for the Marxist Brecht the former is the inevitable outcome of the latter’s ultra-competitive ethos. Brecht employed “alienation” effects to encourage audiences to engage rationally with the critique of society in his plays rather than identify emotionally with individual characters. But nonetheless there is a human vulnerability on display here which Jordan makes us feel strongly without becoming sentimental. The demotic dialogue is punctuated with expletives that are often used for caustic humour.

The ambivalent figure of Mother Courage (played by the Globe’s artistic director Michelle Terry with ferocious energy) dominates the drama: a tough survivor who will not settle for victimhood whatever is thrown at her, she struggles for a living around the battle lines as an entrepreneur cum war profiteer who exploits the situation to her own advantage, selling soldiers whatever they will buy with dynamic pricing from her cart.

She is also a tigress-like single mother to three children (all with different fathers): the bold Eilif, the naive Swiss Cheese, and the mute Kattrin. But though she attempts to protect them from harm, she is partly responsible for each of their downfalls because of her obsession with money.

Rawaed Asde and Nadine Higgin.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Eilif is recruited to the army while she is distracted by selling a fake bullet-proof vest to a sergeant (and is ultimately executed for killing farmers for their pigs during a truce, which had earlier made him a war hero); Swiss Cheese is tortured and killed by the enemy for refusing to tell them where he has hidden his paymaster box while his mother is haggling over how much to give them to release him; and she allows Kattrin to go off with soldiers who disfigure her in a sexual attack. Though Mother Courage is complicit, here we share her trauma and guilt.

There is also quite a lot of barbed comedy amidst the pathos. Mother Courage is portrayed as a wheeler-dealer or street-hawker always trying to flog a deal, whether it’s a scrawny capon or dodgy burgers, beer or drugs, cartridge belts, or sex – courtesy of camp prostitute Yvette. Her quasi-romantic relations with a Chef and a Minister who vie for her attention are also coloured by how useful they can be to her: she’s nobody’s fool.

This lively production directed by While (Pentabus Theatre’s artistic director) brings out Brecht’s innate theatricality as well as conveying his political message, in a show that is thoroughly entertaining and at times surprisingly moving.

The impressive design by takis features a curving wooden walkway through the yard along which Mother Courage’s clapped-out cart trundles, with a pit between it and the stage into which corpses are tipped. The stage itself is littered with detritus including tyres and old furniture, with pillars encased in scaffolding and oil drums like an industrial wasteland, backed by purple and green banners representing the opposing armies.

James Maloney’s splendidly varied score, which ranges from Kurt Weill-style jazz to rave dance music, is performed live from the balcony by a five-piece band wearing army fatigues, with added sound effects such as rat-a-tat snare drum taps for gunshots.

Terry gives a spellbinding performance as a raucously resilient Mother Courage with a lust for life – and a zest for business – despite one setback after another. But she also suggests the personal cost that she bears for her collaboration with the war machine, especially when singing a heartbreakingly broken lullaby to her dead daughter.

Vinnie Heaven is the brave but reckless Eilif who wants to prove himself, Rawaed Asde plays a sensitive yet steadfast Swiss Cheese, and Rachelle Diedericks is a touchingly compassionate Kattrin. Filter co-founder/artistic director Ferdy Roberts returns to the Globe to give another enjoyable turn as the minister who after defrocking to save his life loses his faith and relapses into cynical sensuality, while his rival the selfishly pragmatic chef is also amusingly played by Nicholas Tennant. Nadine Higgin gives sex worker Yvette a sassy stage presence and soulful singing voice. And Max Runham is the sympathetic narrator who replaces Brecht’s titles and placards to put the events in context for the surrounding audience.