This production of Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece seems to break the first rule of Brecht’s epic theatre, which requires emotional distance. It conjures Brecht’s upside down world, in which war denotes order and profit, while underlining all the losses that Mother Courage faces in spite of her relentless entrepreneurialism and attempts at profiteering – selling anything from burgers to ammunition and sex. But it is human, moving and funny. The distance closes and the production becomes devastating in its most savage moments, when Mother Courage loses her children, one by one.

Translator Anna Jordan justifies these moments by interpreting Brecht’s rule of verfremdungseffekt as making the drama “strange” rather than distanced. And in director Elle While’s powerful production, the emotional drama is tightly controlled, flaring up momentarily. In between flare ups, the narrator (Max Runham) pulls us away from the intimacies of this family to draw the bigger picture, summarising the gyrations of war and Courage’s travails over the years.

Michelle Terry as Courage is a calculating hustler with few soft edges – a cross between a musical hall entertainer, a Victorian waif and the Wife of Bath. Time strips her of so much yet there is always a new scheme and a crude, nudge-wink humour that makes her eminently human and lovable, along with leg-flicking showbiz numbers such as Business Song at the start (“Stagger up and carry on”).

James Maloney’s compositions also create distance, with a jazz-infused musicality that suggests the war is a horrible kind of cabaret. Rollicking upbeat songs create a powerful kind of dissonance between sound and subject matter, with characters booming out big numbers in abject situations. Nadine Higgin is a particular highlight as Yvette, the sex worker on Mother Courage’s payroll, with the archly sexualised The Fraternisation Song.

Courage’s children are modern, moving characters too, from the war-hungry Eilif (Vinnie Heaven) to the meeker Swiss Cheese (Rawaed Asde) and the silently unspeaking Kattrin (Rachelle Diedericks). They delicately balance the jeopardy in their world and fear of death with a youthful quest for adventure.

The play was originally set in the 17th century, during the thirty years’ war, and premiered at the start of the second world war. Here, its location seems timeless yet contemporary, with sweary characters who look and sound of our time. Armies are defined by colours, to make war seem all the more senseless and absurd. They exist in a featureless world, with a mass grave around takis’s stage design, into which bodies are thrown.

Power and gender are artfully unpicked by Jordan (she has dealt with both themes equally skilfully on screen with shows such as Killing Eve and Succession). For Courage, there is no self-pity, no despair or giving in. War does not afford her that luxury. She bears a Beckettian sense of endurance – a stoic and a pragmatist, who barters for Swiss Cheese’s life (it gets him killed), and tells the raped, disfigured Kattrin that she will never have to go through this horror again (“That scar is a blessing … They go for the pretty girls”).

The production does full justice in its portrait of complicated, imperfect and doggedly hopeful motherhood, too. Courage plots her children’s survival to the end, in spite of the violence around her. When you see her pushing her wagon alone in the final moments, it feels truly tragic, but she is surviving, still.