Moeder Courage Lisaboa Houbrechts / KVS & Toneelhuis

How do you live and survive in a war as a child? As a young woman? As a mother? Starting from these questions, Lisaboa Houbrechts performs the text Mother Courage.

Mother Courage is Bertolt Brecht's famous anti-war play about the sutler Anne Fierling. Brecht situates his play during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), a European conflict between Catholics and Protestants. A sutler was a woman authorised to march with the troops and sell food, drinks and daily necessities to the soldiers. In the course of the story, she loses her children to the war that she herself helps sustain. Brecht wants us to condemn her for her opportunism, but she has something tragic and layered at the same time.

Lisaboa Houbrechts sees Mother Courage as an ambiguous and complex character. She is all in one: she is perpetrator and victim, mother and commerçante. But for Lisaboa, war is not just something between nations and peoples. War also rages in the family and in the intimacy of the female body. Houbrechts chooses to stage the original text of Mother Courage in its entirety — including Paul Dessau's songs. She wants to explore how the text can become contemporary precisely because of its historicity. With a diverse cast, including Lubna Azabal, Laura De Geest, Koen De Sutter, Alain Franco, Joeri Happel, Aydin Ìşleye and Boule Mpanya, Lisaboa translates the theatre text into a unique multilingual, musical and visual universe where beauty is not shunned.

Mother Courage is part of an impressive series of enigmatic female characters in Lisaboa's work, such as the Dulle Griet, Medea, and Yerma.