AVANT-GARDE THEATRE: PETER’S BROOK’S MAHABHARATA

1. AVANT-GARDE THEATRE: PETER’S BROOK’S MAHABHARATA

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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’.

5. 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?

6. 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.

7. PETER BROOK • There are many similarities in Barrault ad Brook’s concepts of theatre. • Like Barrault, Brook is a pragmatic director, who works empirically.

8. 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’.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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).

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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)

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. EXAMPLE

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. MAHABHARATA • As listener, this boy literally represents the audience, who see the action through his eyes.

36. 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.

37. 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.