The Mother review | Theatre

In a concrete amphitheatre surrounded by the gleaming towers of capitalism, Phil Willmott has had the wit to stage Brecht's most explicitly communist play. And even if history has undermined Brecht's ideological certainty, this 1932 piece still works, in Mark Ravenhill's beautifully pithy translation, as a moving demonstration of its heroine's progress from apathy to

Theatre This article is more than 12 years oldReview

The Mother – review

This article is more than 12 years oldThe Scoop, London

In a concrete amphitheatre surrounded by the gleaming towers of capitalism, Phil Willmott has had the wit to stage Brecht's most explicitly communist play. And even if history has undermined Brecht's ideological certainty, this 1932 piece still works, in Mark Ravenhill's beautifully pithy translation, as a moving demonstration of its heroine's progress from apathy to activism.

Taking his protagonist, Pelegea Vlassova, from a novel by Maxim Gorky, Brecht shows how she is stirred into action by necessity: when her son, Pavel, is arrested for consorting with revolutionaries, she takes over his role distributing leaflets. Confronted by hard evidence of police violence towards striking protesters, she becomes ever more impassioned: one of the best scenes shows Pelegea and other unlettered workers learning to read and demanding to be taught useful words such as "class war" and "exploitation" rather than "fish" and "tree". But, instructive as the story is, one sees how in his later, greater plays Brecht would go much further in exploring the cost of commitment to an idea: the scene where Pelegea is too busy printing leaflets to console her fugitive son offers intimations of Mother Courage without its gut-wrenching power.

The play is still eminently worth seeing, especially for Nicky Goldie's fine performance as Pelegea: she brings out not just the character's political growth, but also her peasant cunning in a scene where she feeds her imprisoned son while extracting vital information from him. Alistair Hoyle lends Pavel the right mix of fragility and conviction, Willmott himself (alternating with Mark Ravenhill) plays the workers' initially cynical teacher very persuasively, and the ensemble is vigorous and strong. You don't have to embrace communism to see that Brecht's play still has much to teach us about people power.

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