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The loss beyond a win

Peter Brook's new play 'Battlefield' returns to the Mahabharat, this time to explore its terrifying warning

A scene from the play Battlefield. Photo: Caroline Moreau<br />
A scene from the play Battlefield. Photo: Caroline Moreau

After three decades, Peter Brook, perhaps the greatest living playwright in the English language today, went back to the Mahabharat for his latest stage production. Battlefield is simultaneously an apt and wildly incongruent companion piece to Brook’s breathtaking 1985 production The Mahabharata. The latter was an epic 9-hour production. Arrows rained over the skies, a burning chariot wheel tumbled across the stage, making that masterpiece one of the canonical works of modern stagecraft.

Battlefield is, essentially, three men and a woman on a stage of umber and ochre contemplating warfare for just about an hour. The scene adapted for this play occurs at the end of the epic battle for the Kuru lands, when the Pandavas have won. The good king Yudhisthira wonders why, after this titanic battle between vice and virtue that the virtuous have won, victory feels like a defeat. He is accompanied on stage by Kunti, Dhritarashtra and an actor playing several victims. The fifth person on stage is musician Toshiyuki Tsuchitori, drawing a succession of sombre moods and bitter emotion from a small traditional Japanese drum. Indeed the austerity of the production is of such emotional intensity and narrative centrality that it may as well be the sixth, and lead, actor.

After a critically-acclaimed run at London’s Young Vic theatre which began earlier this month and ends on 27 February, Battlefield will move to Mumbai and engage with an audience that has previously taken umbrage at Brook’s “appropriation" of the great Indian epic.

Why go back to the Mahabharat again? I asked. In an interview with the Financial Times in 2014, Brook had mentioned how, after The Mahabharata, he had been inundated with offers to produce other epics. But he had refused. He didn’t want to become known as the “epic guy". And yet here is Battlefield.

“After all these years and years of reading the Mahabharat and learning it and talking to people about it and going to India and talking to wise people and ordinary people…I came to the conclusion that it is exactly in the Indian tradition. What isn’t in the Mahabharat exists nowhere. It is not a slogan. It is truth."

Brook says that while there isn’t any shortage of epics in the world—Homerian, Gaelic, Germanic—none of them is as universal as the Mahabharat. The only one that comes close is the Bible, “if you put the Old and New Testaments together".

“While there is only one truth," Brook explains slowly, in carefully formed sentences, “there are numerous interpretations of this. The Bible, the Quran, Buddhist texts…and there is the Tao. The Tao is at the other end of the spectrum. That analyses everything and in the end says that there is nothing." There is an element of this in the Mahabharat too, Brook says. That when all is done, all that is left is silence.

Thirty years ago, Brook says, the Mahabharat, this epic that every child in India knew, had decided to make itself known to the whole world. “And we were merely the servants fulfilling this destiny."

Many Indians, in an “anti-colonial" spirit, as Brook puts it, didn’t like that. In the August 1988 issue of the Economic And Political Weekly, Rustom Bharucha described the 1985 epic play as a “blatant (and accomplished) appropriation" that presented “non-Western material within an orientalist framework of thought and action, which has been specifically designed for the international market".

“They said, ‘This is ours. What are you doing?’ For which I had a very good answer," Brook remembers.

Brook’s response to these charges of appropriation was to point to Shakespeare. “People were thrilled to take this work, the only English work of comparable scope, and translate it into so many languages." Surely the Mahabharat, then, was worthy of such propagation? “We did whatever we could. Nine hours is nothing to tell the story of the Mahabharat. But today the play has taken it to so many places all over the world."

Since then, Brook says, he has resisted the temptation to take on other epic projects. Instead he became engrossed in something that he says is as universal and as all-encompassing as the Mahabharat—that “little bit of flesh inside a box of bone" called the brain. Brook’s last play before Battlefield was The Valley Of Astonishment, a similarly minimal exploration of synaesthesia. Before that, in 1993, he had staged The Man Who, based on Oliver Sacks’ collection of neurology case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. The New York Times called The Man Who a hypnotizing work that was “as spare and tightly constructed as his 10-hour Mahabharata was winding and discursive".

But what led him to make the Battlefield?

Brook says that he and his collaborators, especially life-long partner in crime and co-director Marie-Hélène Estienne, began to look at the Mahabharat in the way that scientists look at the atom. Look closely enough and you will find new wondrous things. Brook found a response to the modern obsessions with winning.

“Victory is a defeat. Simple lines. Businesses want to win. Politicians want to win. The Americans want to defeat Isis (the Islamic State network) and win. But what does all this mean? Victory is a defeat. The Mahabharat has a terrifying warning. What happens after this terrible war of destruction? Which is a very modern war of destruction where millions die. Kurukshetra is a forewarning of Hiroshima. But what happens afterwards?"

Brook says he wants Battlefield to make leaders today think like Yudhisthira and Dhritarashtra. “What happens now? How do we move on? We can’t just retire and say our job is done."

And it is this contemplation of victory as defeat that Brook wishes to explore in his play. Reviewers and interviewers have also seen the play as a response to misfortune in Brook’s own life—Natasha Parry, his wife of 64 years, died in 2015.

While praising the play highly, some reviewers have found that Battlefield offers no solution and that it “induces an acceptance of fate", to quote The Guardian’s Michael Billington.

That is perhaps Brook’s point. Unlike the Bible, which promises redemption to some and damnation to others, the Mahabharat’s greatest message perhaps is that redemption doesn’t matter at all. The idea is not to win at life, but to live it well. This is at once simple and infuriatingly confounding. Like the epic itself.

Battlefield will be staged from 5-12 March, 7pm, at Tata Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Nariman Point, NCPA Marg, Mumbai (66223724/66223754). Tickets, 500- 5,000, available at the venue and on in.bookmyshow.com

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