Transcript peter`s brook`s mahabharata

AVANT-GARDE THEATRE:
PETER’S BROOK’S
MAHABHARATA
PETER BROOK

The search for a universal theatre language, one
potential form of which Lindsay Kemp developed
out of pop culture in the mid-1960s, has become a
major and continuing theme in the work of Peter
Brook.
PETER BROOK

Brook became a covert to the avant guarde at a
relatively late point in his career, having already
made his name during the twenty years after the
Second World War in Shakespeare productions,
as a director of Covent Garden opera and light
comedy.
PETER BROOK

In the early 1950s Anouilh and Fry were being
credited with reintroducing poetry into the
naturalistic modern theatre; and it was through
Anouilh and Cocteau that Brook came to a
concept of non-verbal ‘poetry of theatre’.
PETER BROOK

By 1960 Brook found himself interested in such
questions as:
Is there nothing in the revolution that took place in
painting fifty years ago that applies to our own
theatrical crisis today?
 Do we know where we stand in relation to the real
and the unreal, the face of life and its hidden streams,
the abstract and the concrete, the story and the ritual?

PETER BROOK
And the answers he found were in The Theatre
and its Double, which had only just become
available in English translation (1958).
 Quoting Artaud, ‘The theatre must give us
everything that is in crime, war or madness, if it
is to recover its necessity’, Brook stressed ‘the
nothingness of our present position and the need
for a search.

PETER BROOK
There are many similarities in Barrault ad
Brook’s concepts of theatre.
 Like Barrault, Brook is a pragmatic director, who
works empirically.

PETER BROOK
For Brook, the 1964 ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season
has a significance out of all proportion to its
actual substance or achievement, as his frequent
references to it in his book The Empty Space
indicates.
 Brook’s aim was to create ‘the poetic state, a
transcendent experience of life’ through shock
effects, dries, incantation, masks, effigies and
ritual costumes; to use changes of light to ‘arouse
sensations of heat and cold’.

PETER BROOK
On this metaphysical level the group’s
performances were a self-conscious and
pretentious failure.
 The experiment began by each actor attempting
to communicate an internal state by pure
thought transfer, adding vocal sound and
physical rhythms ‘to discover what was the very
least he needed before understanding could be
reached’, and developing a body language.

PETER BROOK
Artaud exits, calling out ‘well, if it’s realism you
want, adieu!’ – and this set the tone for the
rendering of The Spurt of Blood.
 Artaud’s mini-play was presented twice, the first
time with the dialogue accompanied by a crude
mixture of symbolic gesture and naturalism, all
in three minutes.

PETER BROOK

Brook’s shortened production of The Screens was
labeled as merely ‘work in progress’’ and the
second part of the experimental season never
appeared.
PETER BROOK
One of the improvisational exercises, expressing
emotional states in fictional situations through
Rorschach-like abstract action-paintings, which
had been used in The Spurt of Blood and
provided some of the most powerful moments in
The Screens, was repeated in a more
sophisticated form in The Marat/Sade (1964).
 The image of a madhouse world dominated the
action, which Sade was shown arranging for his
own self-indulgent entertainment.

PETER BROOK

The build on the LAMBDA (London Amateur
Dramatic Association) experiments with audience
relationships, in which the spectators were
surrounded by action or changed places with the
actors, and the same technique was extended in
US (1966).
PETER BROOK

The attempt to go beyond language, and to find
more direct ways of relating the audience to the
action, has yielded some of the most exciting
interpretations of conventional drama, like
Brook’s 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream.
PETER BROOK

For the Dream Brook rehearsed his actors
intensively in improvisational exercises,
‘attempting to alter or strengthen the initial
impulse that lay in the centre of the physical
movement’, and to form a ‘vocabulary’ out of
acrobatics.
PETER BROOK

His rehearsal methods and the ‘empty space’ of
the square white gymnasium set, or the direct
physical contact with the audience, clearly
related the Dream to his experiments with
Seneca’s Oedipus, and with The Tempest (both
1968)
PETER BROOK

In the Tempest exercise Prospero and Caliban
were presented as complementary aspects of a
single personality, with ‘This thing of darkness I
acknowledge mine’ a the central motif, and the
intellectual, spiritual aspect of the mind losing
control of the atavistic, instinctual Caliban.
PETER BROOK
The choice of Seneca’s Oedipus also emphasized
the violent and irrational side of life.
 Like Brook’s Lear, where conventionally
humanizing elements – such as the servant’s
protest against Gloucester’s blinding – were cut,
the thematic point of both productions was to
explore how much suffering a human being could
sustain without splitting under the pressure.

PETER BROOK

Not only was existential honesty itself seen as
‘the most positive’ attitude available in the
twentieth-century context of genocide, political
torture and total warfare, the destructive
anarchy of sexual urges expressed in these
productions was itself considered liberating.
PETER BROOK
In rehearsals for Oedipus, exercises were
developed from Tai Chi, using gravity as the only
source of energy to achieve economy of movement”
a reduction of expression to essentials that
characterizes all Brook’s experiments at the
CIRT.
 The initial impetus for this research into theatre
language came from the response to the RSC tour
of Lear, by Eastern European audiences, who
understood practically no English.

PETER BROOK
Brook’s company was internationally composed,
including actors from Japan, Africa, Persia and
Spain as well as France, Britain and the USA.
 It meant reversing the traditional priorities of
communication: elevating the secondary elements
of gesture, pitch, tone and the dynamics of sound
or movement that give expressive values, over
the primary element of intellectual meaning.

TOWARDS A THEATRE OF MYTH
Linguistic experiments culminated in the
production of Orghast at the 1971 festival in
Persepolis. Working with the group Ted Hughes
created a special speech, also labeled ‘Orghast’, to
underline the organic unity of content and form
in his play.
 The intention was to compose blocks of sound
that would have a status of physical action, and
be indecipherable by intellectual analysis.

EXAMPLE
GR
ULL
BULLORGA
ORGHAST
• Eat
• Swallow
• Darkness
• from ULL + ORG(life)
• Sun
• ORG+GHAST(spirit/flame)
TOWARDS A THEATRE OF MYTH
Orghast must be counted a vindication of Brook’s
Theatre of Ritual.
 But European critics pointed to serious internal
contradictions:

the collage of western and Asiatic myth, intended to
be pre-rational, had been painstakingly constructed
and was highly intellectualized;
 the supposedly universal language of the script
turned out to be incomprehensible, and in fact
became a barrier to communication;
 The effectiveness of the piece was solely due to the
unique physical surroundings and special
circumstances of the occasion.

TOWARDS A THEATRE OF MYTH

In addition to Orghast, troupe performed a
farcical sketch by Ted Hughes, unrolling a carpet
in the middle of a mud courtyard for their stage.
This became Brook’s motif on a African tour in
1972-3, out of which came The Conference of the
Birds.
TOWARDS A THEATRE OF MYTH

Leading a small multinational group of actors
from Algeria, through Nigeria to Dalhomey and
Mali, Brook was searching for the audiences
without even a word “theatre” in their language,
in order to develop universal stage vocabulary.
TOWARDS A THEATRE OF MYTH

The important factor was not what Brook
brought to native audiences, but what he took
from the experience. It sharpened his rejection of
western culture in toto, while at the same time
causing him to modify his definition of
primitivism.
MAHABHARATA

Final outcome of Brook’s search for a theatre of
roots was a far more conventional analogue of
Orghast in the 1985 Mahabharata, which was
distilled from the ancient Indian epic, borrowed
eclectically from Kathakali and Noh techniques,
had scripted dialogue and was originally
performed overnight in a stone-quarry.
MAHABHARATA

As the longest and, with its earliest versions
going back to at least the fifth century BC, one of
the earliest epic poems reflecting historical wars
in the second millennium (several hundred years
before the fall of Troy), the Hindu classic of ‘the
Mahabharata’ could be considered to have an
intrinsic universality.
MAHABHARATA
In order to capture the all-embracing unity of the
original, Brook and Carriere covered the whole
poem, compressing the families, who though
closely related, destroy each other in fighting
over their kingdom, to two Kauravas (from
original 100) and five Pandavas.
 Many secondary digressions were omitted; and
the main story-line was reduced to its bare bones.

MAHABHARATA
What Brook worked for was the same mythic
status, but without the barrier of an alien culture.
 He kept certain Kathakali-like elements – such
as a scarlet-faced figure of divine retribution, but
his staging was marked by a striking economy of
visual effect and gesture.

MAHABHARATA
Instead of a drowning king writhing on the stage,
one corner of a scarlet cloth was dripped into a
river.
 The image of luxurious court at its ease was
created by unrolling a carpet, cushions piled on
the sand, and a few candles in silver saucers
floating on a pool.
 For the dust and smoke of the battle, the actors
threw a handful of powder into the air.

MAHABHARATA

Such symbolic simplicity was required by the
scale and extravagance of the story, which not
only includes supernatural beings but also deals
with ‘ a universal struggle without pity’ between
heroic combatants.
MAHABHARATA
Yet by relying on the figures of the actors alone
to inspire the audience’s imagination, Brook
deliberately brought myth down to the human
level.
 Written down by Ganesha as the poet envisions
each scene, the story is also being told to an
anonymous boy: the distant descendant of the
Pandavas.

MAHABHARATA

As listener, this boy literally represents the
audience, who see the action through his eyes.
MAHABHARATA
In Brook’s view, the poem has the status not only
of archetype, but also of prophecy. It is a forecast
of the disasters caused by western
commercialism and of the ultimate end for its
aggressive civilization.
 However, this is no warning intended to produce
a change of heart in the public, and so save
civilization from its fate.

MAHABHARATA

The significance of The Mahabharata for Brook is
indicated by the fact that he and Carriere worked
on the adaptation for almost ten years before it
reached the stage.