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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
Visceral, defiant and ferociously human. Brecht's anti-war masterpiece, Mother Courage and Her Children, comes to Shakespeare’s Globe for the very first time. Playing a strictly limited run, book your official tickets to this blistering modern adaptation today.
War rages, resources are scarce, and hope is a dangerous luxury. In Mother Courage and Her Children, a hardened trader hauls her cart across a brutal war-torn landscape, surviving by profiting from the very conflict that threatens to destroy her family.
Part survivor, part opportunist, Mother Courage bargains, barters, and compromises her way forward, convinced that staying in business is the only way to stay alive. But in a world where everything has a price, each victory costs her dearly, until the true price of survival becomes devastatingly clear.
Packed with live music, dark humour, and fierce urgency, this modern staging of Brecht’s landmark anti-war play delivers a powerful critique of war, capitalism, and moral compromise that feels as relevant now as ever.
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