This National Theatre production starts with a true Brechtian bang — lots of people milling about a brightly lit, very functional stage before the start, all equipment showing, stage managers acting out the part of doing the practical things they would be doing anyway and so on — and it carries on with assorted acts of homage to the master. But what is striking is that the real power of this extravaganza is something rather unBrechtian: the enormous emotional force of Fiona Shaw's long-suffering but unbroken Mother Courage, trailing with her children behind confused armies, scraping a living as a huckster between one terrible bereavement and the next, from one terrible error to the next. There's not enough Brechtian alienation under Warner's direction or Shaw's exquisite psychological observation to distance us from a deep emotional sympathy with this strange 17th-century female spiv. I'm inclined to take Brecht's wife Helene Weigel's view of alienation anyway: "It was just a silly idea that Bert came up with to stop his actors overacting." But, strictly speaking, this production is off-message.

So what, one might say. The production is what it is: who cares about the dramaturg, to use a horrible word that seems to be back in fashion? In this production the music was uninspiring, the aphoristic lines were often leaden in their didacticism and the scenes often too slow and too long, but it was none the less emotionally powerful at times. And there is no escaping its convincing relevance to war-stricken countries today. Mother Courage stands for every ordinary person, overtaken by meaningless war without (of course) understanding it, who struggles to survive but at the cost of most of what matters. The play's conclusion, with Mother Courage bereft of everything but courage, still dragging her wagon behind her, driven only by the will to survive, has a fearful universality.

Horváth's Judgment Day, though perhaps not quite so moving, is a better and much more subtle and intellectually interesting play. It is the story of a fateful chain of events, set in pre-war Germany, which lead to a disastrous train-wreck and the judgment that must follow. Though the allegory is obvious, it is not heavy-handed: a dutiful stationmaster in a small German village is distracted for a moment by a mischievous young girl and fails to give the right signals to the oncoming train, but then protests his innocence. In their attempts afterwards to find someone to blame, or to live with self-deception, or even to be minimally decent, everyone concerned is tragically compromised. Everyone is in some way responsible, even through the smallest of cruelties and the pettiest of gossip. But this is not as bleak as it sounds, despite its despairing vision and the claustrophobia of the excellent set. Rather, it is hypnotic and beautiful with some flawless performances and, of the two plays, this is the one not to miss.