From the lighting rig are suspended wire grids on to which are fastened ragged cardboard placards. In sketchy letters, as if scrawled in haste, are written scene numbers and titles. Exits and entrances between the ranked seats are lined with metal crash barriers; a used tyre, shopping trolley and oil drum are stacked at the sides – most will feature as props over the course of the performance. Joanna Scotcher’s sparse design poetically suggests the desolation of war that reduces all places to any place. This space is toned by Jim Fortune’s equally effective music – simultaneously particular yet of no one time.
Mother Courage enters – crop-haired, in baggy-bummed trousers – with the two sons and dumb daughter she is going to lose, one by one. Each will be bullet-torn while she trades or haggles. Behind them they drag the engine-busted, battered and adapted ice-cream van from which Courage makes the family’s desperate living, flogging shirts and booze, guns and drugs to war-worn soldiers.
Anna Jordan’s new adaptation, directed by Amy Hodge, shifts Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 anti-capitalist, anti-war play from 17th-century Germany and sets it in 2080, in a world divided into numbered zones, formerly known as “Ukraine” or “Spain” or “Bosnia”, where Blues interminably fight Reds for “resources”. This fantastical relocation blurs Brecht’s logic of the business of war, morphing the play into a standard-seeming, dystopian-future fiction.
Julie Hesmondhalgh’s Courage is strong and canny, a profiteer hardened by violence(she lobs a grenade for the fun of it). If her performance doesn’t yet have the depth or texture that make Courage a mythic figure, it does have a power and intensity that make this a production worth seeing (and worth the fourth star).
• Mother Courage and Her Children is at Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 2 March
