What a difference good sound and lighting can make to a show. It may sound like the blinking obvious, but when you see the good stuff, you realize how much it elevates a production.
Take the recent shows from Berkeley Rep and Cal Shakes — Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, respectively — both of which present smooth, professional results from what can be self-consciously theatrical material. Minor quibbles aside, both shows leave you in a thoroughly satisfied mood and a huge part of that is the effect of the setting, the lights and the music.
Interestingly enough, the talented Alexander V. Nichols designed the lighting for both shows, and for both, Gina Leishman created original scores. Well, gifted professionals are always in demand, especially when their work makes you look so good.
For any Brecht play, a certain spare, carny grime is de rigeur, it seems, and Rachel Hauck’s scenic design for Mother Courage strips Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre back to a black box with scattered set pieces emerging like so much flotsam. Throughout the evening, actors scrawl graffitoed tags in chalk across the black walls — “Sweden, 1624,” “Protestants,” “Fraternization Song” — like markers or keywords in a Google search. But if the set suggests an abandoned, cavernous big top, it is Nichols’ lighting that adds the emotional desolation, the sense of cold moonlight on a sleepless night. And it’s Leishman’s hurdy-gurdy, oompah score that lends the drawling lilt of disappointed hopes disguised with sarcasm.
Mother Courage recounts the fable of a war privateer (Ivonne Coll in the title role), who ekes out survival and profit for her family during the 30 Years’ War in the 17th century. It’s a parable that Brecht wrote on the eve of the Second World War just as a veil was slowly falling over the horrors of the First World War and it’s tempting to call it timely — a lesson on the travails of war as we sink into the fifth year of another kind of religious war. Director David Hare’s translation has retained the Brechtian provocation in cynical nuggets that seem custom made for quoting in anti-war pamphlets. But I couldn’t help but be fascinated, not with parallels to our war with Iraq, but with the incomprehensible logic and extenuations of the Bechtels and Halliburtons and Mother Courages — with the different kind of betrayal that has nothing to do with the opposing sides, but rather with opportunism.