Guy Jones (GJ): Let’s get started with Brecht. What was your relationship with Brecht before you were asked to look at Mother Courage? Was he someone who had inspired you as a writer? 

Anna Jordan (AJ): I’d seen Brecht as part of my drama training, but I’ve never been a playwright who tries to emulate other work or even feels particularly consciously inspired by other playwrights’ work. That’s not to say that I’m not subconsciously inspired – I’m sure I am – but I think part of my process has been really ploughing forward with my own ideas and getting something down on paper. Early in my career it felt so important to get work onto the stage, whether that’s in a rehearsed reading, or in a festival, or anything – just to really focus on getting work on its feet.  

It’s been interesting for me to approach Brecht, because of his idea of ‘alienation’ (his technique of holding the audience at a distance so they engage with the story on an intellectual rather than emotional level). That sort of thing didn’t interest me at first – I’m all about the feels! – But I’ve come to see that it can be an interesting tool. It’s important for theatre to respond to what the world needs at any given time. Brecht’s audiences wanted and needed very, very different things from the plays in their time. For me theatre’s power is like an empathy machine: it puts you in the shoes of somebody else; helps you to understand what it might feel like to be in different situations. That’s what theatre does brilliantly.  

GJ: Why Mother Courage? 

My mum had been in Mother Courage: she played Kattrin in Bolton in the 70’s. She was a director, actor, wonderful, wonderful director and teacher. And when I read Mother Courage, I really fell in love with the story of it. It holds up Mother Courage as this absolutely imperfect character: she is turned on by the idea of money, of wealth, of keeping her head above water, being a success and winning. It’s brilliant to see that from female characters, and I think it’s a brilliant exploration of what war can do to a person, particularly someone in the role of mother. So often the role of mother is painted as something soft or comfortable or unimportant but it’s the heart of everything, the heart of life.

And it’s a classic for a reason: there are plays that we love to revisit again and again and again and again – and I am interested in how we can continue to refresh those stories, so they are welcoming to new audiences, or they show old audiences something new. And those plays evolve into something that the world needs or wants now.  

GJ: There are so many interpretations of the character of Mother Courage – is she a victim of her circumstance? Is she a poisonous mother? Do you feel empathetic towards her and her circumstances? 

AJ: When my translation was first performed at the Royal Exchange in Manchester (2019), I was a mum to a young baby. I think that Courage is responding to the most extreme circumstances that a mother can expect to find themselves in. I think the world that we’re experiencing now, and the access that we have to 24-hour news cycles, and the sort of everyday fear that we live with, means we are much more able to imagine a world where the unthinkable happens. I think a lot of what happens in Mother Courage is the unthinkable. But look at what’s going on right now: the war in Iran. We really are living daily with this idea of ‘when is this going to arrive on my doorstep?’. Everything’s up in the air, all bets are off. I think that Courage thinks in the long-term, and that makes her cruel in the short-term. She becomes devastated that it’s peace time because she can’t sell the weapons that she’s just bought. She haggles with life and death, and everyone around her behaves like she’s done the most disgusting, terrible thing. She’s constantly weighing things up: I really hope I never have to have those thoughts or ideas or make those considerations about my child.  

GJ: Kattrin doesn’t speak in the play. You don’t use the word mute, although some translations do. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you’ve imagined Kattrin’s silence in your adaptation? 

AJ: We hear that as a child Kattrin was abused by a soldier who “put something in her mouth” and she hasn’t spoken since. There’s a world in which she doesn’t make any noise, and that’s passive, but when we meet Kattrin at the beginning of the play, she’s young and she’s starting to develop feelings about sex and about men: she watches Yvette dance, and she’s sort of mesmerised by her, the way that she uses her body. She’s moving towards this rite of passage time. And it would be really the easiest thing in the world to make her completely quiet. But she’s not, she makes noise. I think there’s something very real and tangible about that, that she’s still a real force and a presence, and perhaps she’s operating in a way that is not conventionally delicate and beautiful and sweet and young. The noises she makes are quite visceral. And then, of course, we see over the period of the play with Kattrin, she ages, and she starts to want to have a child – beginning to obsess about children – and then we get to a point where we start to hear her being talked about as a sort of spinster. It’s a really devastating journey and says so much, not just about war, but about how the world sees women and girls.  

She has huge impact on the plot of the play and the things that happen. She’s got power, even though lot of her traditional ways of being powerful are taken away.  

GJ: In the process of translation how much freedom did you have to reimagine the text? 

AJ: It’s a really interesting, really satisfying process for somebody who writes in chaos, and sort of lives in chaos quite a lot of the time. There’s a real methodical order to translating and adapting that you don’t get when you’re writing an original play. You get a literal translation and then work around that. So, you have early conversations about where are we, when are we, and what does the world look like, and what are the rules of the world, etc. After that, you’re imagining the world that you’re operating in, you get to bring so much of yourself to all the characters. My very first couple of drafts were very tentative out of respect. But with each reworking comes more confidence. So, I’ve been encouraged over the years that I’ve worked on this play to bring more of myself to it. I think it’s a way to open it up to today’s audiences.  

GJ: Is there something about being in conversation with Brecht that makes you feel free to speak within those boundaries? 

AJ: My interest is in how to find the ordinary and the extraordinary: how ordinary people are put into extraordinary, challenging, traumatic situations. There’s a clear antagonist – the machine which values money over life. What I’m interested in looking at is how ordinary people’s lives are impacted by that; how this community has been broken by this big power, how their lives have been disproportionately affected. And what we’re looking at with Courage is how people’s lives are challenged daily by a money-making machine: war. And what are the different moralistic choices that they make? What would we do if we were given those set of circumstances? If we look at the world where this play was first performed – a pre-internet world – Brecht wanted his audiences to take in the information presented and reflect. Now we are swamped with information, and the challenge is to decide which version of information we are going to settle with and live with. I hope this production gives audiences a sense of information-overload that I think we feel now.  

Part of Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’ was to set the action in the 30 Years War in the 1600s. What’s powerful about that is that the audience don’t necessarily have a strong take on who is wrong or right. With this distance, you can see war for what it is: this ridiculous regurgitation of power and conflict. I’m sure people have sat down and found a specific conflict to slot into the story of Mother Courage that feels relevant and of the moment. In this adaptation we have not specified a war: we’ve removed country names and place names, and we use grid references and colours rather than countries and religions.  

GJ: Brecht really believed that art was a tool for change, for the audience to go out and do something or think about things differently. Do you share that belief? What do you hope a new production of Mother Courage might be able to do in the world? 

AJ: Part of the problem with living in a post-truth world, with AI and deep fakes, etc. is that it’s very difficult to know how to make change, to really know where you can have an impact. As a writer, what I aim for my audience to be able to look at someone else’s situation with empathy and grace, and for that to then affect how I move through the world. I sometimes feel pessimistic about how powerless we feel as people in terms of what’s going on in the world at the moment, but I feel optimistic about how we can improve each other’s lives, whether that’s our friends and family, whether that’s our online community, our theatre community, or whether it’s the mums at the school gates. 

GJ: The audience at the Globe have such a specific relationship to the action on stage. What do you think of Brecht in this unique open-air space?  

AJ: The Globe is going to lend itself to Brecht wonderfully: it’s always clear that you’re in a theatre. There’s no hiding that. We’re not trying to pretend that we are in the real world, so there’s an honesty there. I also think that thinking about this play at the Globe has elevated my understanding of Brecht: if the audience is constantly reminded that they are watching a play, they are activated, they are part of the experience. I love the fact that every single time you watch a play it’s different, that it’s going to be different every performance because 1,600 people in the room are different to the people who were there last night.  

ABOUT ANNA JORDAN 

Anna Jordan is a writer, director, teacher and a poet. Her writing credits for TV include Succession (HBO), One Day (Netflix), Film Club (Gaumont / BBC) Killing Eve (Sid Gentle / BBC America) and Becoming Elizabeth (Forge / Starz). Her play YEN won the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting and has had productions at The Royal Exchange, The Royal Court, and MCC New York.  Other theatre writing includes Lost Atoms (Frantic Assembly National Tour / Lyric Theatre Hammersmith), Pop Music (Paines Plough National Tour), Jack and the Beanstalk (Stratford East) We Anchor In Hope (Bunker Theatre), The Unreturning (Frantic Assembly National Tour), and Freak (Assembly Studios / Theatre503). Her plays have been performed extensively all over the world. She has taught and directed at Theatre503 and at drama schools including RADA, Bristol Old Vic, LAMDA, CSSD, Arts Educational and Italia Conti. 

Anna’s first poetry collection Decade is being published by Broken Sleep Books. She also co-runs Support Playwrights with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm; a group of theatre artists finding ways to support playwrights and create community – which can be found on Substack. 

ABOUT GUY JONES 

Guy is the New Work Associate at Shakespeare’s Globe. Prior to working at the Globe, he was Associate Director at the Orange Tree, Creative Associate for Headlong, and an Associate Artist for Company Three.  He is an Olivier-nominated director and dramaturg, whose credits include Atlantis (Theatr Clwyd & Chichester Festival Theatre), Blackout Songs (Hampstead Theatre), O, Island! (RSC) and The Climbers (Theatre by the Lake). He has worked on new plays with theatres including the RSC, National Theatre, Hampstead Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, Theatr Clwyd, Theatre by the Lake, Audible and HighTide.  

Mother Courage and Her Children plays in the Globe Theatre, from 7 May 2026 to 27 June 2026. 

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