Mother Courage and her Children review – wartime profiteering rarely sounded so good

The Guardian

18-05-2025

The noise is constant. It is in the eight marimbas lined up across the stage, which add a South African bounce to Bertolt Brecht's 1939 epic of the thirty years' war. It is in the operatic songs, all lush harmonies and pulsing percussion. And it is in the vocal effects of the large cast, adding birdsong or insect rhythms to the battlefields. Sometimes it is in the crackle of a plastic bottle to suggest fire, the shuddering boom of a drum to indicate an execution, or the grind of hands across metal for machine-gun fire.
All of it is generated by the actors, much like the set, by the ensemble with Janet Brown and Eve Booth: a resourceful collection of corrugated iron, wooden pallets, old tyres and buckets. It gives Mark Dornford-May's production an in-built theatricality: each performance created anew.
But suddenly the noise stops and the silence is piercing. The moment comes when Paulina Malefane's no-nonsense Mother Courage faces her greatest threat. With heavy irony, it is not the conscription of her first son (Brodie Daniel), the execution of the second (Joseph Hammal), nor even the rape and mutilation of her daughter (Noluthando Boqwana-Page). All those she regards as the cost of doing business; collateral damage in the pursuit of profit as she buys and sells from the back of her cart to the highest military bidder.
No, what sucks the air out of her is the outbreak of peace. No war, no trade, no noise.
The respite is temporary, of course. Neither war nor capitalism can rest for long. But the icy silence is a highlight of a gutsy production, filleted down to an economical 90 minutes by playwright Lee Hall, who translated the play for Shared Experience in 2000, and marking the welcome debut of Ensemble '84, a company drawn from the environs of Horden, a former mining village in County Durham overlooking the North Sea.
In collaboration with Johannesburg's Isango Ensemble, the actors are forthright and physical, building a sense of community not just in the makeup of the newly formed company but in the implication that war, like money, draws every one of us helplessly in.
At Horden Methodist Church until 24 May