Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children is a play about war – perhaps the play about war – and in Deborah Warner’s in-your-face new production for the National Theatre it’s certainly one that takes no prisoners.

Through the bloody to-ing and fro-ing of the Thirty Years War we follow the career of Mother Courage, “a hyena of the battlefield”, whose determined lust for profit drags her three children and travelling canteen across Europe, following a war that will bring about both her own salvation, and the destruction of her family.

To alienate or not to alienate – that will always be the question with Brecht. For Warner the answer is an emphatic thumbs-up for the anarchic joys of epic theatre, complete with massive suspended scene headings (gruffly crooned by the voice of none other than Gore Vidal), on-stage costume changes, and a diaspora of outfits and accents spanning centuries and continents.

For all its pyrotechnic trappings and huge cast – the production’s delayed opening night becomes all too understandable once you’ve seen it – this Mother Courage remains essentially a one (wo)man show.

In a motley riot of denim and leather, somewhere at the sartorial junction of rock star and corsair, Fiona Shaw crashes on to the stage. Relishing the quick-fire pulse of Courage’s swift-tongued logic (gloriously rendered in Tony Kushner’s sharp and rhythmic translation), hers is an unusually buoyant portrayal, relishing the character’s bitterly determined optimism at the expense of her cruel pragmatism. The result is horribly beguiling – a discussion of war where the ideological dice, for once, are not unduly loaded.

Performed by Irish folk-rock singer Duke Special and his band, the play’s integral songs become reflective rather than the traditionally abrasive moments. Focusing the production’s deliberately self-conscious sense of spectacle, they contribute much to the rhythm of such a deliberately fractured play, albeit sometimes at the risk of emotive indulgence.

And herein lies the specifically Brechtian Catch-22: If you create a crowd-pleasing production you are in danger of missing the point; if you opt for a faithfully Brechtian one you are in danger of lacking an audience to please.

Warner’s production somehow balances both concerns, finding an intelligent and genuinely engaging level at which to pitch this difficult drama. The result is alienation-lite: all the dramatic flavour with only half the theatrical affectation and endurance. Certainly there are some key ingredients missing, but it slips down so sweetly that after a while you won’t even notice Mother Courage and Her Children continues in the Olivier Theatre until December 8. For tickets tel: 0207 452 3000 (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk).