Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht, adapted by Lee Hall was staged by the Maven Theatre Company at Te Raukura ki Kāpiti. The play was Directed by Sera Devcich and ran 2–10 October 2026.
Reviewed by Penelope Haines
Brecht wrote Mother Courage in 1939, on the eve of a war he could see coming. He set it three centuries earlier, in the Thirty Years’ War, and gave us Anna Fierling, a canteen woman who follows the armies selling boots and brandy. She means to live off the war. It takes her three children instead.
Lee Hall’s adaptation keeps the bite and the humour, with dialogue that sounds spoken rather than translated. The resulting earthiness works well in this production, drawing frequent laughter from the audience.
Maven Theatre Company was founded on the Kāpiti Coast in 2025 by Sera Devcich and Jessica Clough. It aims to create ambitious, thought-provoking theatre while providing paid work for local actors, artists and technicians. Its debut that year, Beth Flintoff’s The Ballad of Maria Marten, offered a contemporary perspective on the infamous 1827 murder case. With Mother Courage and Her Children, the company continues to build its presence in the region’s performing arts community.
Sera Devcich’s production makes full use of Brecht’s alienation devices – the songs, the scene captions, the actors stepping out of the action – yet still plays the story for emotional truth, drawing us in rather than holding us at a distance. The intimate stage of the Sir Jon Trimmer Theatre suits this approach, making the experience close and accessible. The result is a production that makes us think as well as feel.
At its centre is Lindsey Rusling as Mother Courage: shrewd, funny, hard as nails and totally blind to the cost of her choices. She sings with verve and gusto, and her Courage is bawdy, ruthless and immensely likeable. Her vulnerabilities are well hidden, but her devotion to her children shines through it all. The play’s great test comes when Courage must deny her own dead son to save herself and her daughter. On opening night, Rusling’s anguished silent scream shattered the audience with its terrible grief.
The children are well contrasted. Simon Cannell gives Eilif, the brave elder son, just the right amount of moral confusion. Praised and rewarded for a wartime atrocity, he repeats it during a brief period of peace and is executed for the crime, still failing to comprehend his guilt.
Patch Lambert makes the honest, doomed Swiss Cheese a deeply sympathetic character. As the mute Kattrin, Caitlin McDougall has the play’s most demanding silent role, and her performance is exceptional: utterly convincing in her frustration with her mother, and frantic when she cannot warn those she loves of approaching danger. Throughout the play she uses sound to express what her voice cannot. This builds to the climax of the second act, when, in defiance of her own safety, she climbs onto the roof and beats her drum to warn the town. Martin Tidy as the Cook and Alister Williams as the Chaplain supply much of the humour,
bringing warmth and cynicism to their roles. Gayle Hammersley is delightful as the amoral, opportunistic Yvette.
Sera Devcich’s set of sewn sacking creates a bare wasteland, dominated by Courage’s cart, which gradually empties as the play goes on. John Mahan’s lighting and Jessica Clough’s costumes place us loosely in the seventeenth century.
My one small reservation is that the scene captions fade too quickly to be read in full. As they give structure and a timeline to the action on stage, it would help if they stayed up a little longer.
In the end, Brecht’s vision of war, and the profiteering it engenders, is bleak and unyielding. Mother Courage offers no comfort. Its heroine learns nothing from the terrible price she has paid for her beliefs and choices. At the end she harnesses herself to the cart and, alone this time, follows the next army. Maven’s production makes that bleak lesson both entertaining and unforgettable.
I thoroughly recommended this production.
Review by Penelope Haines