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*.

Theatre review: The Good Person of Szechwan

The Lyric Hammersmith's programming is currently giving me flashbacks to my drama degree, and particularly playwrights who, if you'd believed my course, are produced way more regularly than they actually are. After Dario Fo and Franca Rame it's the turn of Bertolt Brecht, and his political morality tale The Good Person of Szechwan. Three gods come to Earth on a mission to find a good person: If there isn't at least one left in the world, they won't be able to avert an apocalyptic flood that will wipe out the unworthy mankind. They've landed in a very poor district, where people are too busy trying to keep themselves and their families alive to worry about anyone else, but prostitute Shen Te (Ami Tredrea) has a reputation for generosity, and is chosen as the experiment's subject. The gods give her $1000 to set her up for the future, and she uses it to buy a tobacconist's shop.

Theatre review: Mother Courage and Her Children

Mother Courage is, apparently, the role Josie Lawrence has most wanted to play her whole career, and now she's got the chance she doesn't waste it, bringing a whole new level of nuance to Bertolt Brecht's antiheroine. Hannah Chissick's production of Mother Courage and Her Children at Southwark Playhouse uses the Tony Kushner translation from the last National Theatre outing, right down to the Duke Special versions of the songs that intermittently break into the narrative. Nominally set during the Thirty Years War, allowing for an epic scope both in time and ranging across Northern Europe, the play follows Lawrence’s Anna “Courage” Fierling as she travels from battlefield to battlefield, lugging a cart filled with food, drink and random provisions she sells to the desperate soldiers. She’s come to dread the possibility of peace, as war is what her entire livelihood depends on.

Theatre review: Life of Galileo

Lizzie Clachan has turned the Young Vic into a planetarium for Joe Wright's production of Brecht's Life of Galileo, one of the most visually stunning and inventive shows on the London stage right now. The set is in the round, with a central pit where some of the audience sit on cushions, with the actors mingling around them. It gives the impression of a group of students in a relaxed setting, sitting around a charismatic teacher who's on a roll. The teacher is Galileo Galilei (Brendan Cowell,) the subject he's excited about the Copernican Heresy, which proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and which astronomer Giordano Bruno had recently been burned at the stake for promoting. But Galileo teaches in Padua, which has a special exemption from the Inquisition's clutches and besides, having stolen credit for the invention of the telescope, he now has a tool that he can actually use to look at the stars and prove Copernicus right.

Theatre review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

In one of the complete restructurings of the Donald and Margot Warehouse auditorium that have been an occasional theme during Josie Rourke's tenure, Peter McKintosh has added an extra row of seats to make the circle in-the-round, and removed all the stalls seating, to be replaced by tables and chairs all around the stage. It transforms the venue into a Prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy for Simon Evans' production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about a man seen as a joke, rising to great power and bringing destruction in his wake. Arturo Ui (Lenny Henry) is a lumbering, awkward gangster who chances upon some dirt on the powerful Dogsborough (Michael Pennington,) and blackmails his way into the city's cauliflower trade. With the success of his protection racket over the vegetable market, Ui takes acting lessons to disguise his awkwardness and make him a better public speaker, and his new mix of threats and rhetoric starts to build a following.

Theatre review: The Threepenny Opera

Prepare for shares in eyeliner to soar as Rufus Norris brings Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's satirical musical The Threepenny Opera to the Olivier with a new translation of the book and lyrics by Simon Stephens, and Rory Kinnear at the head of a real luxury cast. Mack the Knife (Kinnear) is a violent East End criminal, who's managed to avoid punishment so far through a combination of Chief Inspector Tiger Brown (Peter De Jersey) being an old army buddy of his, and the fact that Mack has an incriminating dossier that could cause the new King of England some embarrassment. But his downfall might well come not from his crimes but from his marriage: His new wife is the seemingly timid accountant Polly (Rosalie Craig,) who he hopes can use her organisational skills to help build his criminal empire up.

Theatre review: Fear and Misery of the Third Reich

Fringe stalwart Phil Willmott has followed the example of some of the West End directors in forming his own eponymous production company, although unlike them his is a not-for-profit venture. He opens a short residency of two very contrasting works at the Union with Bertolt Brecht's rarely-performed indictment of the rise of the Nazis, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. There's ominous mentions of the regime's ambitions to invade other nations and spread their power and ideology, but the play's real focus is on Germany itself in the years before World War II actually broke out, and the oppressive atmosphere which sees people betray their neighbours before they can be betrayed themselves. A pair of Hitler Youth (Ben Kerfoot and Tom Williams) patrol as a number of loosely-connected sketches play out, opening with a factory worker (Joshua Ruhle) refusing to join in with the official propaganda, and being carted off to prison.

Theatre review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Probably the last of the major Brecht works I hadn't yet seen, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is the latest of Jonathan Church's West End transfers from Chichester. The satire on the rise of the Nazis recasts Hitler as Arturo Ui (Henry Goodman,) a ludicrous small-time gangster in Depression-era Chicago. He's dismissed by all as an insignificant fool but when a cauliflower cartel corrupts the respected Father of the City, Dogsborough (William Gaunt,) it opens up an opportunity for Ui. Stumbling onto a plot to misappropriate funds he blackmails Dogsborough into letting him set up a cauliflower protection racket. Soon Ui and his henchmen convert fear and violence into political power as well, and while the body count rises in Chicago, Arturo has his eye on neighbouring towns and their greengrocers.

Theatre review: In the Jungle of Cities

Brecht scholars apparently tend to avoid discussing his early play In the Jungle of Cities. It could be because it's so far removed from the rest of the playwright's work, although it's just as likely to be because, if they mentioned it, they might be expected to understand it. Notionally set in Chicago, it follows a surreal and nonsensical battle of wills between two men. Shlink (Jeffery Kissoon) is a wealthy lumber yard owner. Looking for a worthy opponent, he strikes on George Garga (Joseph Arkley,) the dirt-poor employee of a lending library. Arriving at George's place of work with his goons, Shlink challenges him to a battle of their spirits, and seems to break the poorer man's and get him entangled in the game, to take the first round. His next move is a surprising one though: He gives Garga all his property and volunteers to be his slave.

Theatre review: A Life of Galileo

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The RSC isn't inviting the Press to this until Tuesday.

To round off the RSC's "A World Elsewhere" season, looking at what else was going on in the world during Shakespeare's lifetime, we have a 20th century classic that deals with one of Shakespeare's exact contemporaries, Brecht's A Life of Galileo. Always strapped for cash, Galileo Galilei passes off the Dutch invention, the telescope, as one of his own. He gets found out but not before the new tool gives him a new look at the heavens, and he realises he's found proof of Copernicus' theory that the Earth rotates around the Sun. The fact that the theory is considered heretical by the Catholic Church doesn't dim his enthusiasm or deter him from sharing his knowledge with the people. But the Church won't let mere evidence get in the way of centuries of teaching, and soon the Inquisition has taken an interest, demanding that Galileo betray his science and abjure his theory.

Theatre review: Mother Courage and her Children

Last year touring company Blackeyed Theatre's production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle sneaked into my top ten of 2011, so when I saw that director Tom Neill's next foray into Brecht would also be coming to Greenwich, booking was a bit of a no-brainer. This time Neill tackles perhaps the best-known of Brecht's plays, Mother Courage and her Children, using Lee Hall's translation. Anna Fierling, aka Mother Courage, makes war her business: She travels the battlefields of Europe with her cart, changing allegiances as necessary, selling food, drink, clothing and anything she can make a profit out of to the various armies. She's determined that she can make a living out of war without having to pay the price herself, but over the years she has to watch as all three of her children die either directly or indirectly as a result of the conflicts.