Mère courage

Bertolt Brecht's most famous play, and a stirring indictment of the follies of war, Mère Courage et ses enfants recounts the tragic fate of Anne Fierling, a traveling merchant who follows the armies to sell her wares during the Thirty Years' War, a devastating European conflict between Catholics and Protestants.

Despite the dangers and death lurking all around her, Mother Courage tirelessly traverses the battlefields to sell food and drink to the armies of both sides, the terrible consequences of which become increasingly inevitable.

If Brecht saw in her character the height of opportunism, Lisaboa Houbrechts' new creation takes an innovative look at this complex, ambiguous woman, at once victim and culprit, free-rider and refugee, mother and shopkeeper. For war is not only a matter for nations and peoples, it also rages within families and in the intimacy of the female body.

How do we live in wartime? How do we survive? As a child? As a young woman? As a mother? Based on these questions, the new prodigy of the Flemish stage stages the German playwright's text with startling modernity, as an aesthetic, moving and confrontational fable about women's vulnerability and resilience.