Even without Anna Jordan’s abrasive contemporary translation, Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 tale of a wartime profiteer would seem depressingly relevant. This staging by Elle While, the first for one of the German writer’s plays at the Globe, sits so securely in the wooden auditorium and communes so directly with the audience you feel the place could have been built for him.
It wasn’t of course – the clue is in its full name. But full marks (or should that be full Marx?) to artistic director Michelle Terry for programming this piece of big, bold, populist political theatre. And for giving an enthralling performance as Courage, the hard-bitten scavenger who learns the hard way that commercial neutrality is no guarantee of safety on a battlefield.
I vividly remember both Judi Dench and Diana Rigg in the role, and Terry ranks alongside them. She’s a proper, Elizabethan-style actor-manager, with an instinctive understanding of what works in this unique space, and of her own power as a performer within it. Whether flirting or bargaining with dangerous soldiers, singing one of James Maloney’s evocative, Kurt-Weill style cabaret songs or suddenly dumbstruck and bereft by loss, she holds us in the palm of her hand.
It is not, I should say, a fun watch: I did catch myself at times wishing the show didn’t feel quite so much like it’d been ripped from raw news footage of global conflict and displacement. But it does have the atmosphere of a macabre carnival or a circus of horrors, not least because designer takis (sic) has built a curving causeway out into the pit, creating a circular playing space that echoes the “wooden O” of the superstructure.
Courage and her three children, begot by different absent fathers, drag her wagon repeatedly around this loop. The cart changes function – restaurant, whorehouse, arms dealership. Her family and the fellow travelers she picks up are gradually whittled away. But the grind of war never stops: it merely metastasizes.
We’re told early on by the compelling narrator (Max Runham, who was born with one arm – here a symbol of damage) that the interchangeable Blue and Purple factions have been fighting “for decades” over oil and other resources. Later, targets shift from soldiers and civilians to refugees and an Orange faction enters the fray. “Terrorists?” asks Courage? “Revolutionaries!” says their leader.
Brecht is not subtle, repeatedly underlining that the depredations of war are always disproportionately felt by the poor and by women: rape is an ever-present threat here. Courage’s wagon is for a while home to Ferdy Roberts’s feckless priest, then Nicolas Tennant’s lugubrious cook, so with her they cover the bases of religion, sustenance and profit. Her refrain each time she cuts a conniving deal – “Ker-ching!” – rings increasingly hollow.
Jordan’s translation is blunt and brutal, reflecting a world of filth and depravity, where bodies are unceremoniously dumped into a midden. What’s perceived as an act of heroism in war can become a war crime in brief interludes of peace. If you’re looking for shame, Courage tells a soldier who questions the paternity of her children, it’s in the dictionary “between shag and shite”.
Elle While marshals a substantial acting ensemble with great aplomb and draws effectively loathsome performances from Roberts and Cook. There’s nice work too from Vinnie Heaven and Rawaed Asde as Courage’s sons, and a deeply moving performance from Rachelle Diedericks as her mute daughter Kattrin.
But the show belongs to Terry. Her Courage is a flame-ringleted force, attractive in her crude energy, repellent in her lack of morals, fascinating in the unforgiving brusqueness of her motherly love. It’s a hardcore performance in a hardcore show that won’t be to everyone’s taste. But it’s a service to the public and to the theatrical canon that the Globe has staged it, and on such a scale. Notably, the Royal Shakespeare Company is currently staging Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about the rise of a dictator. Like I say – depressing how relevant he once again seems.
Until 27 June, shakespearesglobe.com. Tickets here
