Mahabharata Act two

It was the horror of Vietnam War that first led Peter Brook to The Mahabharata. Now, it is the endless bloodshed in West Asia. The veteran theatre director is revisiting the epic for a second theatrical rendition, Battlefield.
The play, which opens in Paris on Tuesday at the Theatre du Bouffes du Nord before going on an international tour, captures the anguish of victory after the bloody battle at Kurukshetra that left nearly two billion dead in 18 days.It also raises important questions - does a war ever end conflict and do leaders have a choice between peace and war?
In an exclusive interview to Sunday Times, the rather reticent director who has created the play, along with his long-time collaborators, Marie-Hélène Estienne and Jean-Claude Carrière, says that he has realized yet again how true Mahabharata's claim is - that everything in the human and cosmic life can be found in its pages.
The 90-year-old Brook explains: "Every day we hear of more pain and horror in the senseless wars across the world, the millions of corpses and refugees. The Mahabharata talks of more than a billion corpses. Today we have thousands left dead and homeless almost every day. The most crucial thing Yudhishthira says at the end of a pointless war is: 'This victory is defeat.'"
In 1985, Brook's staging of Mahabharata as a spectacular nine-hour drama in French at a limestone quarry had stunned the world. With its epic proportions and sweep it had made theatre history. For Indians, who knew the epic as a home-grown saga, it was a revelation that it could make for great global theatre. It had an international cast from across 16 countries, which included a Senegalese Bheema, a Malian Bhishma, an Italian Arjuna, a German Yudhishthira and a Japanese Drona. Dancer Mallika Sarabhai played a radical Draupadi.
According to Guardian, the play had cost an estimated £3,50,000 to stage in the UK. Estienne recalls that every time it had to be staged, another play Carmen had to be performed to raise the money to fund the epic production. After travelling for four years, the play was whittled down to a four-hour film. Staging the original play is near impossible today. But that hasn't put Brook off Mahabharata.
"There are a thousand different things in Mahabharata relevant to our world today. Here we felt was the chance to explore not the battle but the moments after it had been won. There was the key answer where the lake questions Yudhisthira as Carriere wrote it. What is victory? The yaksha asks. And the prince replies: 'Defeat'."
This time, Brook says, he didn't want a spectacle. Battlefield will be a "compact and contained" play, with a cast of four raising the question of the pointlessness of war and the minimalistic music of avant garde Japanese free jazz percussionist Toshi Tsuchitori.
There is another reason why Brook picked Mahabharata - it talks at length about the qualities of a ruler, on how experienced, wise and erudite he had to be. "Look around you today, how many leaders are there who are trained, learned or qualified to lead? And if they are, like Kennedy, they don't last long," he says.
In the late 60s, Brook recalls being dissatisfied with the body of works theatre was playing around with - Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, and so on. Around the time he was doing his research, an Indian writer brought him a small script of Arjuna questioning Krishna before the start of the war. "At once it struck me this was revolutionary - a warrior about to start on destruction and he stops to seek answers. Asks why should we fight? Would America or any other nation have the courage to do that?" he says.
The director then stumbled on a kathakali performance of an episode from the epic and remembers being deeply moved. He found a Sanskrit scholar in Paris, Phillipe Lavastine, and started exploring Mahabharata. Why did Arjuna hesitate? What happened just before the war? Who were the Pandavas, their cousins? "The further I went the deeper I was pulled," he says.
Brook remembers being appalled at how little the average Westerner knew of the epic. The final, multicultural work he staged was seminal, both in terms of interpretation and stage craft. Actor-dancer Mallika Sarabhai, who played an exceptionally strong Draupadi rather than a hapless victim, says that in Brook's hands, the Mahabharata became everyone's story. "If one strips it bare, it is a universal story that plays out every day. Fratricide, greed, jealousy, revenge, and lust," she says.
Her only dispute with Brook was that he didn't want to bring in the concept of Shakti into the play. "He didn't want the scene of Draupadi washing her hair in blood because he thought it was gory. I had to argue till the day before the opening that it would be totally unacceptable to anyone who knew the Mahabharata. I told him that if he wanted to stay away from gore he should have chosen another epic," recalls Sarabhai.
The dancer will be helping the team when it travels to India for a show in Marchnext year at Mumbai’s Tata Theatre.