First there’s the prologue. Then the play-within-a-play. Finally, a second half with a knotty back-history of its own. And it’s all shot through with song. That’s an awful lot of storytelling to get through in Brecht’s parable about motherhood and justice. Director Christopher Haydon has an excellent stab at it in this playful and music-infused production, lit up by Michael Henry’s dark and jagged score. But running at nearly three hours, the show ultimately feels a bit bloated.
Adaptor Steve Waters sketches in the context with brisk, light strokes in a script woven through with contemporary allusions. We are in a country in the throes of civil war. When the governor is beheaded in a coup (his decapitated head represented by a carved-up melon), his preening wife flees. She remembers her fancy clothes but forgets her son. Brecht’s unlikely heroine is the governor’s maid, Grusha, who is left to take care of the baby and, in an increasingly perilous journey, tries to find refuge in a landscape ravaged by war.
