Bertold Brecht’s satirical epic ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ is a big show for a big theatre – so it’s a spectacularly brave idea to stage it on the fringe, even in a larger venue like Southwark Playhouse.
It does, however, boast a bit of a USP – the eponymous seventeenth century war profiteer is played by Josie Lawrence: best known as a comedian and impressionist, but also a stage veteran of several decades standing.
She’s very good, too, bluff and charismatic, but also with a terrible weariness in her eyes. Mother Courage's love and care for her ever-diminishing brood of children is palpable, but she is addicted to the financial possibilities of the ongoing Thirty Years War – she only comes alive when she’s working on a new angle. Addiction to profit and addiction to war are the same thing her. But it's hard to exactly blame her: the world has been turned upside down and she has adapted to survive; she is a symptom, not a cause.
Lawrence is the best thing by a long shot about Hannah Chissick's prouction, which makes use of a ho-hum Tony Kushner adaptation. And she also breaks out a nice Bowie-ish vibrato to attack Duke Special’s enjoyable songs, written for the National Theatre’s 2009 production.
The trouble is, it's difficult to not wistfully wish this was the National Theatre’s 2009 production: a very mixed ability cast and a cluttered traverse staging doesn’t do the play any favours, and the thing is three bloody hours long. In certain respects Brecht suits a budget, but at the same time there’s a big difference between pointedly revealing the workings of theatre and just mounting one on the cheap – Chissick's staging doesn’t necessarily look or feel different to any other period fringe production, and there's little distinct about it bar the star.
It’s been aeons since the last big London production of ‘Mother Courage’, and this will do if you’re curious to see it, but a decent lead doesn't compensate for the pedestrian production’s unsuitability to the epic play.