A new staging of Brecht’s Mother Courage in London is being read as a parable of capitalism. It is also, more quietly, a Jewish story, and a warning about the wars we learn to live inside.

A woman drags a cart across a battlefield, selling boots and brandy to whichever army is winning, and one by one the war takes her three children while she haggles. That is Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 drama of the Thirty Years’ War, and this summer Shakespeare’s Globe has staged it for the first time in the playhouse’s history, with the Globe’s own artistic director, Michelle Terry, in the title role. The critics have largely been won over. It is a strange and fitting debut for a Marxist playwright in Shakespeare’s wooden O, an Elizabethan theatre built for a different kind of crowd, now watching a woman refuse to learn the one lesson the play keeps offering her.

The lesson is simple and terrible. “You want the war to work for you?” runs one line in Anna Jordan’s blazing new translation. “You got to feed it something too.” Mother Courage believes she is using the war. The war is using her. She thinks of herself as a trader who happens to operate in a battlefield, and so she keeps moving, keeps haggling, keeps the cart rolling, because to stop is to admit there is nothing left to sell. By the final scene she is alone, still pulling, still convinced the next campaign will set her right. Brecht was famously dismayed that audiences pitied her. He wanted them to judge her, to see........

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