Mother Courage and Her Children is a play of perpetual movement. For Courage and her dwindling entourage, moving on is a constant refrain – a way of life. Brecht’s play would seem to make sense, then, as a promenade performance. In Red Ladder’s production, marking the company’s 50th anniversary, we trundle along with Mother Courage’s battered yet beloved cart, shuffling around the dusty basement of a warehouse in Leeds.
As Mother Courage hawks her wares to soldiers of all stripes, the audience travels alongside her. We move from one undifferentiated space to the next, across the unchanging landscape of war. Sara Perks’ design uses rather than dresses its site, leaving the rusting girders and exposed brick walls to generate their own atmosphere. The setting is often chilling – both literally and figuratively – and it reverberates hauntingly with the melodies of Boff Whalley’s evocative score. But while the sameness of our surroundings might suggest that Mother Courage is moving round in circles, it also flattens out the storytelling, sometimes making it hard to locate where we are in the narrative.
Yet there remains something compelling about this woman who is both robbed and sustained by war. Pauline McLynn’s Mother Courage is stiffened by the harshness of her environment, a tough-skinned survivor who has forgotten tenderness. If her face quivers with emotion, it’s only momentary, quickly replaced with the brash charm of the eternal haggler. She’s a formidable presence, throwing her children into the shadow, though it’s refreshing to see her mute daughter Kattrin given a greater role through Bea Webster’s signed commentary.
Displacement by war has obvious echoes of the ongoing refugee crisis, but director Rod Dixon never quite succeeds in his attempt to put us in the shoes of those fleeing conflict. The performance suffers from the clumsiness that often plagues promenade theatre, as the community chorus chivvy us along between scenes and the actors twiddle their thumbs until everyone’s settled. In among all this movement, clarity is often lost, and pace and rhythm both suffer from the regular interruptions. Like Mother Courage, we keep moving, but it’s not always clear why.
At Albion Electric Warehouse, Leeds, until 20 October.
