If you want to find reasons for Labour’s election defeat, you’ll discover fine analysis and woeful exemplars in National Theatre Wales’s production of Mother Courage. Taking a leaf out of his namesake’s seminal book on working-class theatre, A Good Night Out, John McGrath’s production is staged – and apparently set – in the Merthyr Tydfil Labour Club.
Around the walls, numerous TVs show nonstop Jeremy Kyle and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, footage from recent wars and army recruitment ads. Here is unbreakable community spirit shown in direct collision with the tabloid values that have fractured it. But the production problematically attempts to rehabilitate Bertolt Brecht’s cold, criminal pragmatist as a sentimental,folksy heroine, presenting Mother Courage as a lovable Shameless-style rogue who succeeds in spite of the odds.
The production is performed by an all-female cast of nine – bolstered by a 25-strong (also all-female) community chorus. This is a great conceit. Brecht’s songs are turned into karaoke standards – Dafydd James’s arrangement of The Great Capitulation here owes much to I Will Survive – and half of the cast are dressed in Friday-night glad rags. But the venue, while steeped in splendid ambience, has bad acoustics and sightlines, which strip away all that atmosphere. Perhaps as a result, the acting seems trapped between Verfremdungseffekt and emotionally sincere soap acting.
Curiously, in the climatic final scene, in which Courage’s sole surviving child, Katrin, sacrifices her life to warn of the approaching army – the 250-strong audience watches from the Labour Club car park – the town’s bells play The Internationale. Days after the result of the UK election, no music has ever sounded more misunderstood or like a death knell. This is Brecht performed as an epitaph for British socialism.
• Until 22 May at Merthyr Tydfil Labour Club. Box office: 029-2063 6464.
