SOURCE: “Haggle with Mother,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 24, 1995, p. 21.

In the following review, O'Connor offers a tempered evaluation of Hare's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children.

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...