MOEDER COURAGE
Lisaboa Houbrechts / KVS & Toneelhuis
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How can you live and survive in a war as a child? As a young woman? As a mother? Using these questions as her guide, Lisaboa Houbrechts presents the play Mother Courage as a moving, confronting fable about the vulnerability and resilience of one of world repertoire’s most iconic female characters.
Mother Courage is a famous anti-war play by Bertolt Brecht about the sutler Anne Fierling. Brecht sets his play during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), a European conflict between Catholics and Protestants. A sutler was someone who had permission to travel along with the troops to sell food, drink, and other provisions to the soldiers. In the story, Fierling loses her children to the war she helps sustain. Brecht wants us to condemn her for her opportunism, but at the same time there is something tragic and pitiful about her.
Lisaboa Houbrechts sees Mother Courage as an ambiguous, complex character. She is all-in-one: perpetrator and victim, profiteer and refugee, mother and tradeswoman. But for Lisaboa, war is not just something between nations and peoples. War also takes place within the family and the intimacy of the female body. She chooses to stage the original text of Mother Courage in its entirety, including songs by Paul Dessau. She wants to investigate how the play, exactly because of its historicism, can become contemporary. With a diverse cast featuring Lubna Azabal, Laura De Geest, Koen De Sutter, Alain Franco, Lisi Estaras, Pietro Quadrino, Joeri Happel, Aydin Isleyen, ea., Lisaboa translates the text to a unique, multilingual, musical and figurative universe, where beauty abounds.
Mother Courage is part of an impressive series of enigmatic female figures in Lisaboa’s body of work, including Dull Gret, Medea, and Yerma.
Mother Courage as an Ambiguous Woman
Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) is set during the Thirty Years’ War and follows Anna Fierling, better known as Mother Courage, a market woman who travels across Europe with her cart, trading with soldiers. She tries to profit from the war while caring for her three children—Eilif, Fromage Suisse, and Katrien. In a world ruled by uncertainty, chaos, and distrust, Mother Courage is driven by commerce and greed to extract as much profit from the war as possible. Her cynical attitude prevents her from learning from her mistakes; to her, there is no end in sight to the war, which seems bound to unpredictable developments. Ultimately, Mother Courage’s relentless opportunism leads to the loss of all her children. In this way, Brecht demonstrates that capitalism does not solve human suffering but rather perpetuates it.
Mother Courage originates from The Life of Courage: The Notorious Thief, Whore, and Vagabond (1669) by the German writer Grimmelshausen. It tells the saga of a young girl who survives the Thirty Years’ War using her supposed cunning and sexual appeal. She is portrayed as an amoral young woman who flits from man to man, moving through a series of husbands and lovers, ultimately ending her life in a traveling troupe. Grimmelshausen lived in the 17th century, a time when women were systematically oppressed, and femicide was rampant. Women without families, prostitutes, single mothers, and midwives were especially distrusted and persecuted as witches. A witch was seen as a promiscuous and rebellious woman who undermined Catholic and patriarchal authority. Hundreds of thousands of women were tortured, burned, or hanged throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.
Bertolt Brecht gave Courage a different interpretation, transforming the cunning girl who weaponized her sexuality into a single mother ruthlessly engaged in commerce. Lisaboa Houbrechts focuses in her production on Mother Courage (Lubna Azabal) and her entourage: her three children (Pietro Quadrino, Aydin Isleyen, and Lisi Estaras), her two lovers—the cook (Koen De Sutter) and the field preacher (Joeri Happel)—and her associate Yvette (Laura De Geest). Houbrechts understands Mother Courage as an ambiguous and layered character, not easily grasped. Her relationship to femininity, sexuality, and motherhood is complex and ambiguous: she moves between care and pragmatism, affection and detachment. The ambivalence surrounding whether her children are truly her biological offspring is reinforced by casting actors with minimal age differences.
Lisaboa Houbrechts goes a step further than Brecht, focusing on the role of femininity in the war economy. Yvette, for example, is not just a sex worker but also an active participant in economic negotiations. The women in the play are not innocent but are aware of how war violence marks the female body. The audience’s distance from Mother Courage, which Brecht intended, originally failed and remains challenged today. The tension between empathy and incomprehension is heightened in this version by addressing the tragic realities that women, in particular, must navigate. This perspective on female guilt, intersexuality, and infertility is a recurring theme in Lisaboa Houbrechts’ oeuvre, including Medea (2023) and Yerma (2024).
Lisaboa Houbrechts’ Cyclical Drama
Lisaboa Houbrechts presents the political play as a multidisciplinary installation in which poetic, metaphorical, and contemplative strategies take center stage. By incorporating Lynchian dream sequences, reinforced by the music of Alain Franco and Aydin Isleyen and the lighting design of Fabiana Piccioli, she creates alienating contrasts between the scenes, responding to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. In her contemporary staging, she breaks open the historical time document and creates an indeterminate and desolate landscape in which Bertolt Brecht’s theater text unfolds. Within the timeless, cinematic setting, historical and future-oriented references intertwine: images from the Thirty Years’ War, the 1930s in Germany and the United States, the Cold War, and a dystopian future evoke a continuum of conflict and oppression. The different languages spoken on stage—French, Dutch, Kurdish, and Hebrew—underscore that war is a phenomenon of all times and places.
The characters appear as insignificant beings struggling within a submerged brutalist setting, emphasizing their vulnerability and subjugation to the endless and elusive threat of war. A central scenographic component is a monumental three-meter-high sphere that is pushed forward and functions as a polyvalent symbol: it alludes to Mother Courage’s cart, the bullet that kills Fromage Suisse (Pietro Quadrino), and a foreboding tumor that emits various world sounds, from war to opera. The cyclical path of the sphere evokes the movement of a clock and the planets, reflecting the inescapable passage of time as well as the female cycle.
Lisaboa Houbrechts consciously chooses to make violence felt in an indirect way—not through explicit confrontations, but through its constant, underlying presence in the scenography, movement, and Alain Franco’s sound design. The sense of threat remains latent, keeping the characters in a state of constant vigilance and making them approach their surroundings with suspicion. In this way, the audience is challenged to see war not merely as a historical phenomenon but as an existential, cyclical reality deeply embedded in the human condition. Yet, Lisaboa Houbrechts still believes that not all hope is lost. Through beauty, poetry, and humor, she introduces moments of lightness into the performance, supported by the songs of Kurdish musician Aydin Isleyen. She also deliberately opts for a diverse, intergenerational cast with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and artistic disciplines. Thus, musicians Aydin Isleyen and Alain Franco—both inexperienced actors—share the stage with seasoned performers such as Koen De Sutter, Lubna Azabal, Joeri Happel, and Laura De Geest. Additionally, choreographer Lisi Estaras translates her role as the mute Katrien into an expressive language of movement. This multifaceted composition embodies a form of hope: regardless of their origins or pasts, the performers come together on stage to tell a shared story, making the unifying power of theatre visible.
- Dina Dooreman
In the Press
"With a stunning performance by Lubna Azabal, ‘Mère Courage’ resonates disturbingly with the torments of our time. A play brilliantly directed by Lisaboa Houbrechts."****
Le Soir
"And the lived struggle of women's being, of the androgynous mother Courage, unfolds into an urgent and timeless epic, embedded in the masculine glow of war. Courage's maternal patience, her violence and her ironically good intentions are ruthless allies. And yet I hang on the lips of this woman, who hungrily travels with her fatherless children in the shadows of the front as a personification of the systemic profit economy associated with war."
Etcetera
"Featuring the incandescent Lubna Azabal, the Flemish director's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's anti-war play hits the current situation head-on and, with an extremely precise aesthetic, reveals the atrocities of our time."
L'Oeil d'Olivier
Credits
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Live recording
Live recording on demand via inge.jooris@kvs.be (programmers) or sebastien.parizel@kvs.be (press).
Contact
PRESS OFFICER
Sébastien Parizel
sebastien.parizel@kvs.be
0478 92 09 82
(INTER)NATIONAL DISTRIBUTION & TOUR COORDINATION
Inge Jooris
inge.jooris@kvs.be