'Moeder Courage': When contemporaneity steps on classicism

The director of this contemporary look at Bertolt Brecht's classic Mother Courage, Lisaboa Houbrechts, arrives at the Greek Theatre preceded by a certain fame for having grown up in the kitchen of Jan Lauwers' Neecompany and worked alongside Alain Platel and Ivo Van Hove, all of them protagonists of the best Belgian theatre. Also for her other contemporary views on Medea in the Comedie Francaise or on Orpheus and Eurydice directed to Hanover. In those shows he mixes - I want to believe successfully - visual arts, music, text, choreography and performance.

There's a bit of a mix-up in his take on Brecht's anti-war classic. Houbrecht had to keep almost the entire text, as the playwright's heirs only allowed a small percentage of the original to be cut and said nothing about the stage directions. The text is there, but Brecht was somewhat confused by the director's decisions, who seems more interested in the visual and sound aspects and the textures of the images than in clarity of narration. Among the successes of the proposal are the original songs composed by Paul Dessau and even some nice choral additions.

Houbrecht justifies replacing the iconic cart that pushes Courage and her children with a heavy sphere that will symbolize life and the female body. Well, I'd say it doesn't work either as what it tells us or as a dramatic element. Certainly, the aquatic surface on which the drama and the characters unfold provides beautiful images, but the performances fall far short of the words and intentions, even more so due to the dim lighting used throughout the performance. There's no warmth. There's no drama, even if there are a few screams from the mute daughter, who will die in a kind of performative choreography that's quite attractive but insufficient to lift the performance. The show received only polite and tepid applause from an audience that expected more. It doesn't always get it right. But when they come from outside, you have to look at it first.