As our government prepares to increase our involvement in a Middle Eastern disaster we should never have taken part in, Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children seems more pertinent than ever.

The theatre of Bertolt Brecht has always presented a conundrum to directors. In his theory of epic theatre, Brecht declared that, in Martin Esslin’s words, ‘the audience is to be confronted with a body of evidence from which it is to draw its conclusions in a critical, highly lucid frame of mind. The emotions are to be involved only at a further remove.’ But the major plays present such powerful protagonists – Grusha, Galileo, Anna Fierling – and face them with such harrowing dilemmas that an audience is bound to become emotionally involved. Pragmatist that he was, when an actor challenged him with one of his theoretical sayings, Brecht was apt to remark, ‘Who wrote that crap?’ But the balance between the didactic and the emotional is always a challenge for directors of his works.