The Mahabharata
Adapted by Jean-Claude Carriere
Directed by Peter Brook
Anstey’s Hill Quarry

The Mahabharata is a colossal work. Written in Sanskrit, the first versions date back 400 hundred years BC. Then, for nearly eight centuries this epic poem grew to more than one hundred thousand stanzas. Fifteen times longer than The Bible, it is like the Old and New Testaments, all of Homer and thirty years of Mandrake and the Phantom all rolled into one.

Peter Brook and playwright Jean-Claude Carriere first heard stories from The Epic, as The Mahabharata is simply known, when they met Sanskrit scholar Philippe Lavastine in Paris in 1975. Carriere, a screen writer (Belle de ]our, The Tin Drum, The Return of Martin Guerre and, most recently, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) began work on a performing text for Peter Brook’s Centre International de Creations Theatrales (CICT) in 1976. He and Brook travelled in lndia and Carriere continued to work on the play through final drafts and rehearsals from 1982 to its first performance at the Avignon Festival in 1985.

Returning to the Anstey’s Hill Quarry, where they presented Ubu, The Ik and the sublime Conference of the Birds for the 1980 Adelaide Festival, Peter Brook’s CICT production of The Mahabharata is the leviathan of the 1988 Festival.

The sheer scale of the work and the remarkable abilities of Brook and his company make this production historic but it cannot be said to be an unqualified success. The Mahabharata has been described as a culmination of Brook’s work but it suggests rather a repetition and coarsening of his earlier achievements.

There can be no disputing the accomplishment of the first section, The Game of Dice, however. Vyasa, the epic poet begins to relate the history of his people to a young boy while Ganesha, the elephant man, acts as scribe. The comedy is shrewd and fresh and the ironies of the narrative are disarming. At the beginning of the play when the character Bhishma takes a vow of chastity Ganesha exclaims – “the poetical history of mankind is already over. I’ll collect my bits and pieces and be off.” When the problem is solved by Vyasa, the poet, fathering the princess’ child, Ganesha is aghast at such authorial intrusion – “speaking as the scribe, I find this totally unacceptable!” he splutters.

Such narrative quirks enliven the work and deconstruct the action, opening up a greater richness of perspective and interpretation.

There is a similar complexity in the acting. These earthy tales of courtship and conception have a Chaucerian vitality and the themes of destiny and danger are presented with a sort of yogic slapstick. The story of Pandu the pale, who kills a gazelle while she is coupled with her mate, is told with animistic charm, at once naive and ceremonial. This is when the invisible is made visible – what Brook himself calls holy theatre.

The Game of Dice is full of portents. Pandu’s descendents (conceived with more than a little help from demigods) begin to clash with the ferocious Kauravas – all one hundred of them born as a hard ball from their mother Ghandhari and then incubated in-vitro in a hundred pitchers. The birth of Duryodhana unfurling from a flowing red drapery is one of many vivid images from Part 1.

All the principals are introduced – including Orona, master of arms and mentor of the archer, Arjuna, and Kama, son of the sun and unknown brother of the Pandavas.

The stirrings of war are indicated. Vows are made, pacts are formed and deals with deities have strings attached. The developing stuggle for power reaches a compulsive climax when Yudishsthira, eldest of the Pandavas, loses his shirt- and everyone else’s – In a game of dice. This makes way for the events in Part 11, The Exile in the Forest and the apocalyptic karma of the final part, The War.

As with previous Brook productions the use of the quarry site is no mere theatrical whim. Designer Chloe Obolensky’s bold red and green draperies and stylised screens and battlements look extraordinary against the stark rock-face and the eucalypts, while Jean Kalman’s powerful grid bathes the play’s lyric moments in honeyed light and defers to the clear night sky for the darker actions in the drama.

The music, blending Turkish, Japanese and lndian themes, is performed by five musicians on a variety of percussion, reed and wind instruments – including didgeridoo and the distinctive south lndian oboe, the nagaswaram, which also summoned the audience from their patient queueing at the portaloos after the all-too-brief intervals.

Much of the acting is truly remarkable. Bruce Myers’ droll Ganesha and faintly sinister Krishna, Tapa Sudana ‘s whimsical Pandu and Siva, Yoshi Oida’s memorable Orona, Marnadou Dioume’s imposing Bhima and the intricate detail in Sotigui Kouyate’s Bhishma, come immediately to mind. But Miriam Goldschmidt as Kunti, Mireille Maalouf as Gandhari, Mallika Sarabhai as Draupadi and Ryszard Cieslak as Dhritarashtra are also equally impressive. Nolan Hemmings’ Abhimanyu is a disappointment and in the latter sections Jeffery Kissoon’s Kama and Andrzej Seweryn’s Yudhishthira start to sink in rhetoric.

Which is also to say the latter half of the play is burdened with a leaden narrative which is in disappointing contrast to the lambent enchantment of Part 1. It is not just the audience which is fatigued by the time the battles begin. There is less invention to staging and more bombast in the acting so that it is hard to sustain enthusiasm when some of the warriors finally face their nemesis.

Having fashioned such a rich patterning of stories in the first half of the play (although there are lapses into rather obvious comedy in Part 11) Brook and Carriere then loosen their narrative grip in Part 111 such that the poet Vyasa (played engagingly by Robert Langdon Lloyd) is used less decisively and, because of the doubling as Krishna, Myers’ Ganesha is absent altogether. Although much is made of parallels between the play’s secret weapons of total destruction and nuclear warfare in our own time, the martial scenes in Brook’s saga come perilously close to those of an interminable gladiator movie.

It is traditional for The Mahabharata to be performed throughout the night but, unlike Balinese or southern lndian audiences who can come and go, eat, sleep, attend to their children and so on, the solemn Western convention of numbered and extremely confined seating, makes the experience unnecessarily arduous and formal.

If Parts II and III were conflated into one and the performance ran from midnight to dawn, perhaps the symmetry of the work would have been better preserved while still permitting the resolution and implications of the story to coincide with the first glimmerings of daylight.

As it is, too many splendid moments in The Mahabharata become buried in turgid repetition and images are dulled by the tyrannies of the storyline. When that happens, more, unfortunately, becomes less.

Murray Bramwell

“Day for Night” The Adelaide Review, No.48, March, 1988, (Festival edition), pp.30-31.