What a long road it seems, since the first National Theatre production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, thirty years ago at the Old Vic, when Kenneth Tynan had to bargain with the Lord Chamberlain’s office over W. H. Auden’s use of the word “balls” in his translation of one of the songs. David Hare’s “new version” of [Mother Courage and Her Children,] is liberal in its use of colloquialisms. As a foreword to his introduction to the published text, Hare quotes Ruth Berlau’s opinion that if it keeps too close to the original, the translation will not be good: “They try to copy the play in their own language. They want to be as faithful as possible—and then nothing comes of it.” Perhaps the greatest difficulty facing the translator and adaptor of Brecht’s plays and poetry is to find an equivalent for his humour. At this first night, there was a good deal of laughter, so on that level the version can be said to succeed.

Although Hare has not altered the shape of the play, or the order of the scenes, by using very modern English idiomatic phrases—“I told him to stuff his rotten inn”, “market forces”, “I’ll smash your face in”—he has moved the dialogue perilously close to that of a television sit-com. This might work better in a rougher production, but Jonathan Kent’s highly stylized staging moves the whole thing closer to a revue. This softening impact is aided by Jonathan Dove’s music, with its echoes of Kander and Ebb and Sondheim. Though pleasant in itself, and particularly well suited to Dame Diana Rigg’s singing style, it has none of the harshness of Dessau’s score for the Berlin première in 1949, nor indeed of George Fenton’s rock-influenced music for Howard Davies’s production of Hanif Kureishi’s version at the Barbican in 1984.

Paul Bond’s set uses the Olivier space in the most positive way. A semi-circular wall completely fills the back of the stage, making the performing area into a circular floor. The crumbling stucco has various doors and windows which open, sometimes to reveal a landscape, most effectively in the scene in which peace is declared, with avenues of autumn trees stretching into a deep false perspective. The costume and props are of the First World War, rather than the 1620s, for instance when the sex worker Yvette reappears as a colonel’s widow with fox-fur tippet, ankle-length hobble skirt and button-boots. In the pauses between scenes, a huge bird of prey circles above the stage, caught in the beam of a searchlight.

Diana Rigg plays the title role in a somewhat restrained manner. As suggested by John Willett in his official translation, she uses a North Country accent, but, dressed in a pink turban, and in one scene in the plundered fur coat, she resembles Gracie Fields in Sing As We Go. I say this not to denigrate her performance, which is full of pathos and fine detail, but to point out the appropriateness of the vaudevillian manner. Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel, both admired Ethel Merman and wanted her to create the role in the United States (she didn’t). It has been said that Weigel’s famous “silent scream” in the Berliner Ensemble production was inspired by one of Ethel Merman’s facial expressions in Annie Get Your Gun. Rigg carries off the moment of denial before the corpse of her son with fierce, quiet intensity. Otherwise, the production is dominated by Lesley Sharp’s incandescent performance as Kattrin, the mute daughter. Her pale face, staring out into the darkness, and the frustration and rage she conveys go some way to balancing the kitsch effect of some of the staging.

Both Brett Fancy as Eilif and Bohdan Poraj as Swiss Cheese, the two sons of Mother Courage, establish their characters, the one recklessly heroic, the other innocent. Doon Mackichan is very funny as the “rich” Yvette; “I love shopping”, she says, as the haggles with Mother Courage over the purchase of the old cart. Neither David Bradley’s Chaplain nor Geoffrey Hutchings’s Cook really suggests the split personalities of the characters. Brecht wrote that Cook “is a good man in good times and a bad man in bad times, generous when he has money, anxious and ruthless when broke”. For the songs, the players need to move a bit more obviously outside their roles, to establish a Brechtian rapport with the audience. He called it the alienation effect, but what he was really looking for was a more direct communication. Only Hutchings, with his “Solomon Song”, really brought it off.

Since the play is given on a single set, and the characters do not age noticeably (except Yvette, who appears with a walking stick, and the cart itself, which is stripped bare by the end), one misses the sense of Mother Courage’s long journeys, and the passing of twelve years. In his introduction, Hare compares Mother Courage as a character with Brecht’s Galileo—both “extremely clever people”—and proposes an alternative title for the play, The Silencing of Mother Courage. She is, he writes, a character who has an answer for everything until the end, when, completely isolated and alone, “everyone else sings and she is at last silent”.