MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN | STAGE REVIEW
Merthyr Tydfil Labour Club, Mon 11 May
Merthyr Tydfil Labour Club is the unlikely setting for National Theatre Wales’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage And Her Children, a play that examines the timeless relations between war and profit. The production takes place in the main concert hall of the club and, walking into the space, the atmosphere was more akin to a Saturday night out in Merthyr – a Brecht meets Gavin And Stacey experience.
Ed Thomas, cleverly manipulating the rhythmic cadences of the south Wales Valleys, delivers a revised script brimming with wry humour and the odd expletive here and there. It looks and sounds fresh and vibrant, but it’s a Brechtian adaptation not for the purists who will lament the absence of the classic verfremdungseffekt. This is especially true in the use of the songs interspersed throughout the play, with Dafydd James’s Karaoke style numbers imaginatively lifting inspiration from Country and Western through to Burt Bacharach, having the overall effect of making us feel rather then think.
In keeping with the overall concept of the play, Courage’s cart is a collection of shopping trolleys which, at certain points in the play, separate out into different sections. This is a brave take on what is an iconic theatre object, made famous through many significant productions of Mother Courage (including Brecht’s own version with Helene Weigel) and offers a trenchant commentary about consumerism in our culture.
Along with TV screens showing clips from the Food Channel, Sky Sports and Jeremy Kyle, the production isn’t entirely clear as to whether its aim is to celebrate working class values or critique the contemporary post-capitalist ideology on display. The question of whether Mother Courage is a shameless pragmatist or a victim herself of circumstance is never quite resolved, but the performance by Rhian Morgan is perfectly nuanced, especially when she has to disown the body of her recently executed son.
A cast of nine women play all the characters and bring a wonderful vibrancy and energy to the roles. The direction by John E McGrath reveals detailed approaches to character interaction, although at times in the first half it was difficult to see or hear the action due to the sight lines and acoustics of the hall, and this led to some confusion in following the story for my companion. But the second half makes up for that with a radical change in staging that brings with it a greater sense of the journey that Mother Courage undertakes with her ‘cart’ across the wastes of war-torn Europe.
There are some excellent performances throughout by the cast, including Sharon Morgan as the dumb, vulnerable Katrin, Sara McGaughey as the brazen Cook and Eiry Thomas as Courage’s son Eilif, who gets carried away with the glory of battle.
Whether the play critically explores the remorseless continuation of money and war in a way that Brecht posits is open to debate, but the dynamism, humour and vitality of the production is worth seeing.
words ALEX WREN