Review: Mother Courage and Her Children, Shakespeare’s Globe ★★★★

Mother Courage: Any War, Anywhere

War is good for business. That is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of Mother Courage and Her Children, and in 2026, it feels all too current.

Bertolt Brecht wrote this play in 1939, as Europe lurched towards catastrophe. He set it during the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648, chosen because it was distant enough that audiences might consider it without defensiveness: a brutal, religiously-fuelled conflict that killed between four and twelve million people, most of them off the battlefield through famine and disease, while a class of war profiteers quietly prospered. Brecht, who had fled Nazi Germany six years earlier with his wife, actress Helene Weigel, understood that war is something that certain people find ways to survive, while others do not.

This production makes one striking and shrewd dramaturgical choice: rather than anchoring the conflict in named countries, it locates armies within a grid system, identified by colour rather than nationality. The effect is immediately disorienting, in the best possible way. It calls to mind the dystopian territories of The Hunger Games, but the resonance runs deeper than that. Without flags to hide behind, the war becomes universal. It could be any war. It could be any time.

This production is a Globe first: Brecht has never been staged here before. It uses Anna Jordan‘s translation, which debuted with Take Back Theatre in Manchester in 2019. It is direct, vigorous, and feels modern (though some may find the level of swearing lessens its eventual impact). The production has a great pace.

The Globe uses an in-the-round thrust with multiple entrances, including through the groundlings, which gives a sense that the audience are participants in the world rather than just observers. Designer takis has leant into the makeshift and the ruined. The set is dishevelled and grimy, assembled from whatever has not yet been destroyed. The magnificent theatre behind fits, after all, wars across Europe are fought within and around such treasures.

James Maloney‘s music deserves particular mention. Brecht famously described his songs as dramatic grenades, thrown into the action to jolt the audience out of passive feeling and into active thought. Maloney’s score leans into this strangeness rather than softening it. Using an eclectic and sometimes deliberately unsettling palette of percussion, winds, piano, saxophone, clarinet and trumpet, the songs are not comfortable. And director Elle While uses them to devastating effect: the whiplash between a moment of dark, almost carnivalesque delight and sudden violence keeps the audience in a state of sustained, deliberate discomfort.

At the centre of it all is Michelle Terry. What her performance makes searingly clear is that Mother Courage is not, at heart, a war profiteer. She is a woman with no other options, chancing what she can when she can, trying to keep her children alive in a system designed to consume them. The tragedy, rendered here with quiet, accumulating force, is that when the war ends, it is financial ruin: she has structured her entire survival around a machine that has now stopped, and taken everything she loved in the process. Terry conveys all of this, the shrewdness, the love, the terrible cost of each pragmatic decision, with real authority.

The scene of Kattrin’s death is exceptionally moving, with Terry’s response an achingly tender lullaby: the full accumulated weight of everything Mother Courage has lost, and every compromise she has made to avoid precisely this moment, distilled into song.

Occasionally, particularly in the broader comic passages, there were flickers of a register that nudged slightly towards sketch comedy rather than staying fully inside the world of the play. It is a small note in an otherwise commanding performance.

The supporting company is strong throughout, coping with multiple roles and huge emotional shifts. Their energy and despair are equally strongly portrayed and they cope with the choreography (and some very dramatic falls from stage) with flair.

What lingers, walking back out across the Thames, is the feeling that this production has done precisely what Brecht always wanted: not simply to move you, but to make you think. The hell of the Thirty Years War. The hell of 1939. The hell that feels, in 2026, considerably less distant than we might wish.

Content guidance: Strong language and scenes of a distressing nature, including war, sexual assault and violence. Loud noises, drug use and weapons.

Access: BSL-interpreted, captioned, relaxed and audio-described performances available. See the Globe website for dates.

All photos: Marc Brenner

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