Review Mother Courage And Her Children

Mother Courage And Her Children
By Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Tony Kushner
Music By Duke Special

Peace In Our Time?
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Thirty years is a long time in politics and showbusiness, but it's much, much longer and far more cutthroat and arbitrary for citizens and subjects having to cope with the on-off Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Hannah Chissick now directs Tony Kushner's translation of Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage And Her Children with music by Duke Special, first seen in the National Theatre's production eight years ago.

The play spans the war that ravaged the European continent with Josie Lawrence in the main role in a traverse staging in transformed warehouse, Southwark Playhouse.

The audience enters the battlefield through a trench-like tunnel with grimy, grey-white plastic tarpaulin hanging from metal poles. 

First the good points - Josie Lawrence is magnificent, a force of nature with a tremulous gleam in her eye, determined to survive, run a business and hold together her children, no matter what.

Her singing and acting experience also gives her the voice, along with some of the other theatre veterans in the cast, to negotiate an acoustically difficult space.

In this production, it is a play of two halves with the decision to adopt regional accents in the first act making some of the actors with lighter voices almost unintelligible in a space where there needs to be perfect pitch to be heard.

The uneven nature of the first act  may lose a few camp followers in the audience which would be a shame because post-interval the accents are suddenly discarded and the ensemble comes together in a far more heartfelt and stinging second act. The problematic acoustics do not quite go away but they become far less of a problem.

Besides Lawrence's Mother, the most consistent performances of the night come from Julian Moore-Clark as her terminally honest and loyal son, Swiss  Cheese,  David Shelley as the chaplain and Ben Fox as the Dutch cook.

For those who have not grown up with the German history school syllabus of 1939 and the religious and political battles, Mother Courage And Her Children needs to hit the correct increasingly frantic notes along the route of Anna's picaresque travels with her increasingly disintegrating family.

This only comes about in the second half  when the seemingly heroic but self-destructive act of Phoebe Vigor's Kattrin is truly powerful and the lighting of Robbie Butler comes into its own. The decision to ally the play with imagery and sounds from the First and Second World Wars is also a wise one.

After all, Brecht and other citizens had experienced an on-off battle to survive economically in Germany from the First World War onwards which became something else after 1933 and the seizure of Germany by the National Socialists.

Barney George's design keeps it simple, tarpaulin and metal poles with the cart dragged by Mother Courage able to move across the space.

However the decision to have an upper balcony on one side may have seemed logical, putting the (temporary) victors and actor musicians on high. But it means in addition to acoustic irritations, one half of the audience might feel discriminated against, having to continually turn around to see the action.

So this is a production which eventually finds its balance in an unhinged world. Josie Lawrence and a few others are tremendous but it needed far tighter direction to keep other members of the cast on course in the first act. It's an upper range amber light.   

Review The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner
Adapted by Matthew Spangler
Based On The Novel by Khaled Hosseini

A Library Of Suffering
http://thekiterunnerplay.com/

For refugees from countries riven by conflict the decision to exit, to flee, is hardly a choice - and the world is hardly an open book. The Kite Runner started as a novel by Afghani-born Khaled Hosseini whose family left everything to seek asylum in the United States after the Cold-War Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The play is a clear if stolid rendition of a fictional modern refugee tale with almost biblical resonance. Amir and Hassan are constant childhood companions in 1970s' Kabul, an invincible team when it comes to the kite flying battles on the streets of Kabul. But their closeness is complex - not solely a friendship of choice but a master-servant relationship controlled by Amir's father, part of a caste system, and eventually wrenched apart by a rape and a wretched lie.

An intimate family story of betrayal and redemption stretching across the globe set against epic, seismic world shifts, it caught readers' imagination and become a best-selling novel. It's now a stage adaptation which feels as if it knows what it wants to do in theory but in the end is far too constrained by its origins on the page to make for a visceral theatrical experience.

What aims to be an intertwining of messy human experience with an exploration of storytelling and lying turns out to be a clunky framework. Novelist Amir (played as child and adult by Ben Turner) narrates the story, obviously from his point of view, until other voices are allowed their say. Yet the fact that his wronged friend and servant Sohrab (a touching Andrei Costin) never has control of the narrative is drowned out in the linear rush of events.

Still, it's efficiently directed by Giles Croft and has an intriguing design by Barney George which hints at what could have been.

Two kites open and close like the leafs of an illuminated Afghan manuscripts. Spindly brown uneven planks transform from the compound fences of Afghanistan and the notched credit-recording Afghani tally sticks to American skyscrapers. Yet at all times they could be fragile book spines.

This is probably a version which would work much better on a smaller stage in the round rather than an unforgiving proscenium arch stage. While Matthew Spangler's adaptation gestures towards the literary craft, it's never developed enough. The oasis of exhilaration and comradeship of the kite flying alongside the violence and treachery are never the tender mysteries in the midst of suffering and thwarted lives they could have been.

The strengths, and maybe the flaws, of the source material push through the peaks and troughs of this big, baggy play. Many will come out knowing a great deal more about Afghanistan and the refugee experience in West Coast America.

And while some of the problems are specific to their situation, others are more universal with just as much a feel of "There but for the grace of God ..." It's an amber light for a play which, while it remains stubbornly earth-bound, does at least aim to fly high.