Theatre review: Mother Courage and Her Children

Although the run of popular Shakespeares that make up most of the 2026 Globe season are clearly going to be the big sellers, for me the show I was most looking forward to this year was the one that was most obviously the passion project for the Artistic Director, as she took on the lead in the first Brecht play ever staged at the venue. So it's unfortunate timing that Michelle Terry was indisposed for the performance of Mother Courage and Her Children that I caught. All things considered Ayla Wheatley did a pretty heroic job of performing script-in-hand, covering the role of Mother Courage or, as she's often called in Anna Jordan's new version, MC. Though young for the role Wheatley managed to inject some of the character's exhausted gruffness, and the blunt, smutty humour that's a feature of Jordan's script. Being thrown in at the deep end means she had a lot of audience goodwill behind her, so technically I guess the playwright himself would have disapproved*.

His antiheroine is a small-time trader who drags her cart of food, weapons and everyday essentials around the battlefields of a neverending war - here implied to be a post-apocalyptic battle for resources between interchangeable, colour-coded sides.

She's accompanied by her three children, each known for a particular virtue which will, as the story and the wars go on, end up being the end of all of them: Eilif (Vinnie Heaven) is the brave one, Swiss Cheese (Rawaed Asde) the honest one and the mute Kattrin (Rachelle Diedericks) the kind one. Along the way other characters also come and go, including Nicolas Tennant's Chef, who is teased as a potential romantic interest for MC. But as with everything, her insistence on profiting from war will always trump any other potential path for her life to take.

Ferdy Roberts is suitably amoral as the Minister whose religious conviction is easily discarded once it becomes a danger, and who hitches himself to MC's wagon for most of the play; Nadine Higgin as the prostitute Yvette gets the most showstopping of James Maloney's oom-pa-pa songs that punctuate the action, but in her first appearance at least she also shows a lot of simple vulnerability - her taking off her famous red fuck-me boots and putting on slippers at the end of a long day is a tiny, endearing moment.

Elle While's production, which uses a Narrator (Max Runham) instead of Brecht's captions to introduce each scene, feels like a very successful fit to the Globe's stage. takis' set design extends the stage out into the yard to have MC's cart take endless circles on a built-in track. This also creates a central pit into which bodies are regularly thrown in an evening that doesn't shy away from the brutal violence and sexual assault that's a major element of how Brecht views war and those who profit from it. It would have been nice to actually see Terry in what appears to be one of her dream roles, but the good news is that even under imperfect circumstances the production itself holds its own.

Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht, in a version by Anna Jordan, is booking in repertory until the 27th of June at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

*Brecht didn't want the audience to sympathise with Courage, and kept rewriting the play in (unsuccessful) attempts to stop them doing so