CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Brecht's anti-war parable gets acute update from Red Ladder
PIC CAP Outstanding: Pauline McLynn and Bea Webster
[Anthony Robling]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Mother Courage and Her Children
Albion Electric Warehouse, Leeds
IT’S hard to think of many plays better suited to a promenade staging than Mother Courage and Her Children. Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 polemic about the futility of war does, after all, follow the titular anti-hero as she travels from town to town selling wares from her canteen.
In this production, which marks Red Ladder’s 50th anniversary, the audience becomes part of her travelling wagon, part of the sea of people displaced by conflict.
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