I have, hand on heart, never read or seen this play before. I say ‘hand on heart’ because deep up a tower of notebooks, endlessly plotting the fiction I will never write, Mother Courage reminds me of an aloof but duplicitous arms dealer called Catherine Orbelian. A Soho House mauve pencil, pausing over the manuscript, might now slushpile ‘Orbelian’ as ‘slanted plagiarism’ or, worse, ‘tribute’, but the uprising scenes on the streets of Kiev might have have been annotated ‘kooky-prophetic’ had the timing been right. A kind of anti-Zhivago, capitalism not Bolshevism is cast as a low-charged thug.

If you grew up watching the Banana Splits you are probably an expert on Brechtian distantiation already. Non-linear sketches, jump cuts, absurdism, people freezing as if in a photo, falsities rather than truths. Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and the ordinary in the epic, as a way to collapse high and low culture without resorting to Jeff Koons or a mash-up of Mickey Mouse and Brahms.

What seems missing from zappy, heated, enjoyable TV is the political depth that such alienation techniques were originally meant to inspire. By allowing the actor to remain an actor we permit them to keep their personal politics, while Brecht’s role becomes facilitator. Some would say that politics should be the stuffing inside the armchair of narrative, never spilling out into polemic. Keep it for backdrop, dear boy. But what else is there? Family saga? Fun with words? Allowing specific actress x to insert personal narrative y into political framework z does seem to take us somewhere unique, while it can never be accused of becoming lifeless or theoretical. It is only theory if life is theory.

Lizzie Clarke gets better every time I see her. I guess that when you tell someone they’re the central character they rise to the challenge. Tell them they are a 1D love tug and they don’t. Third Law of Femodynamics, innit. Clarke approaches the wagon-bound loot trader as a swinging, indestructible Cockney. Nuffink gets past me (except how her belittling and ‘tough love’ seems to be atrophying her children. The daughter is literally dumbstruck). I wanted to look into Clarke’s life to see who she might be basing this characterisation on, which auntie or McJob tyrant she has bitten her lip under. A Brechtian actress’s personal history becomes her character’s collective unconscious, if that isn’t mauve-penciled as ‘pretentious’.

My only personal experience of war profiteers was a wiry, well-dressed spiv called Joe McN, an early babysitter, who would bomb it up to Belfast throughout the 1970s to cold call on anyone petroled out of their home, offering to buy the property for cash. Got there before the police, they say. Undesirable areas don’t stay that way forever, he would explain. “I changed yewr nappies!” he cracked from the window of a passing four-by-four, the last time I was over.

On stage, war is a machinic, inevitable human energiser (economics and ideology have a way of sorting themselves out but only religion can incubate a war forever. In some ways the Thirty Years War is still petering out in NI, hundreds of years later, and many’s a newspaper career depends on the province not normalising. The latest media horror is racism, the PSNI facing the same number of annual incidents as Nottinghamshire). Meanwhile, Mother Courage rides like a flea on war’s back. She doesn’t care who is winning, the Catholics or the Heretics. “War feeds its people better,” she swipes. Through the carnage, we are waiting for her tough hide to crack. What pain will make Courage repent against war’s goodness (the disfigurement and unspoken maybe-rape of her daughter seems to work better than the death of both sons. Is that feminist or sexist of Brecht?)

The set is pitch-perfect. Boards are stark and denuded, informal. While the West End turns to rock star hyperbole to give people their money’s worth (rather than, maybe, lowering prices) short-run, having-fun productions give us more than mere performance. Swarms of secondary characters roll around like pompous colonels, whores and wretched prisoners would. But in the end it is Clarke as the sad enigma of female toughness that you want to see. In many ways I would have loved more miscasting. Plus, there was the wealth of damaged oompah music wheedling around, an important attention-lifter for Brecht, which turned things very ‘theatre’ for me. If Brecht was writing today he’d surely have a ‘no music’ policy. Maybe he’d be that kind of guy.