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All under 16s must be accompanied by an adult, and cannot be sat separately.
Performance dates
7 May - 27 June 2026
Run time: TBC
Includes interval
Shakespeare’s Globe welcomes revolutionary playwright Brecht to the stage for the very first time with a new production of his anti-war masterpiece, Mother Courage and Her Children.
War rages. Resources are scarce. Hope is a luxury. Mother Courage drags her cart through a wasteland stripped bare by greed and conflict – a profiteer, a survivor, and a mother. She’s learnt to make a living from war, and she’ll sell whatever’s left of humanity to keep herself and her children alive.
In the business of war, every victory costs her something – and eventually, everything.
Filled with live music, biting humour and raw determination, this modern staging of a classic protest piece, translated by Anna Jordan (Succession, Yen, Lost Atoms) and directed by Globe Associate Artist Elle While (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Globe), asks urgent questions about survival, capitalism and complicity.
Globe Artistic Director Michelle Terry (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Hamlet, Globe) leads as one of theatre’s mightiest and most complex female characters, in a darkly hedonistic production that will bring the yard vividly to life with fury, empathy and joy-as-rebellion.
Visceral, defiant and ferociously human.
We can be certain that whenever there is a war, someone is turning a buck. I know it, you know it, and Bertolt Brecht certainly knew it when, in 1939 and in the shadow of war, he wrote Mother Courage and Her Children. Revived at Shakespeare’s Globe with the magnificent Michelle Terry playing the opportunistic woman who tramps the battlefields of Europe with her children, making a good profit out of war, this revival comes in a version by Anna Jordan which relocates Brecht’s original from the 17th century to the near future and a Europe riven by conflict. Originally produced at the Royal Exchange in Manchester in 2019, the text gets fresh life from director Elle White, and Brecht’s meditation on the real price paid by war profiteering should be particularly potent in a world erupting into wars.
Jack Thorne’s vampire drama Let the Right One In (Underbelly Boulevard), based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel and movie, should be a canny choice for the National Youth Theatre and its young cast. Kudos too for bringing in James Dacre, a director with real clout to stage it. The original National Theatre of Scotland premiere was a truly memorable event, so here’s hoping that Dacre and his cast can make something equally haunting of this desperate and painfully tender coming-of-age drama, which contemplates what it really means to be human.
5 May, 2026 | By Lyn Gardner