MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN. To 25 November.
Tour
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN
by Bertolt Brecht translated by David Hare
Benchtours Tour to 25 November 2006
Runs 3hr 5min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 October at Brunton Theatre Musselburgh
Profit without honour in war-torn countries.
For all his plays address the man in the street who’s walked into the theatre, Brecht provided some colossal scripts, which can get bogged down in big-cast, big-set theatre. So Benchtours, theatrical simplicity built into their name and toting their production nightly round Scotland, from Kirkwall to Dumfries, tests what this play can communicate reduced to whatever fits in the back of a van.
If that means some ragged moments in performances (including a rudimentary use of masks), it also means clarity and an economy of style which can place an emotional high-spot during a scene change. For emotional grip is vital outside major cultural centres. In the real world, you grab ‘em or lose ‘em.
Peter Clerke’s production recognises that the emotional grip has to ask why such things are happening. And humour heightens it all. There are 2 narrative threads, one within a scene and the other linking events serially, gradually widening the scope for viewing the 30-Years’ War (which ravaged Europe 1618-1648). Humour offsets tragedy, as it does in Joan Littlewood’s Brecht-derived Oh! What A Lovely War..
You didn’t have to be Brecht to debunk war’s grandeur; Richard Aldington, for one, had already unwrapped pretensions of greatness in his 1930 Roads to Glory stories. But in the years when war meant the idealism of Spain or 1939-1945’s anti-Fascist urgency, displaying it as the outgrowth of capitalism was bold enough.
Humanity here is ordinary and unheroic in the name of survival. Courage (Anna Fierling’s nickname) means selling your loaves before the bread goes stale, even if the customers are the other side of a bombardment. Selfless courage, as Anna’s daughter Kattrin discovers, means death, for a life already victimised in its voiceless vulnerability.
One-armed, scarred and able only to yelp, Cerrie Burnell’s Kattrin still has strong moral force. Catherine Gillard’s response to her son’s death is also silent, agony piling inside her still, staring figure as the world around inconsequently changes the scenery. They are the emotional centre and moral poles of a valuable production, enhanced by the tunes without glory in Steve Kettley’s sometimes literally tinpot score.
Anna Fierling: Catherine Gillard
Kattrin: Cerrie Burnell
Swiss Cheese: David Walshe
Eilif: Nicholas Karimi
Cook: Rod Matthew
Chaplain: Tim Licata
Yvette: Deborah Arnott
Clerk/Musician: Steve Kettley
Musician: Pete Garnett
Director: Peter Clerke
Designer: Gordon Davidson
Lighting: Paul Sorley
Composer/Musical Director: Steve Kettley
Costume: Christine Ross
Movement: Frank McConnell
Voice coach: Carol Ann Crawford
2006-10-30 09:51:29