The Mahabharata Twenty-Five Years Later

At age eighty-five, Peter Brook does all he can to avoid interviews. He has no interest in his own legend, and as for his theatrical ideas, he has said it all before, in his autobiography (Threads of Time), in his other books (The Empty Space, The Shifting Point), and in the body of influential productions that established him as one of the giants of twentieth-century theatre. At the request of a common friend, he nevertheless kindly agreed to speak to me on the subject of his magnum opus, The Mahabharata—a focus of the book I was writing at the time (Great Lengths: Seven Marathon Plays from Three Decades, forthcoming). Brook was in New York rehearsing his adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at Lincoln Center and accompanying the Theatre for a New Audience presentation of Love is My Sin, his staging of Shakespeare sonnets. Although he announced in 2008 that he was giving up day-to-day operation of his theatre in Paris, Bouffes du Nord, he has been notably active. Among his other recent projects have been: Fragments, a program of five short pieces by Samuel Beckett; Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead; The Grand Inquisitor, adapted from Dostoyevsky; and Tierno Bokar, a parable about tolerance and fundamentalism rooted in a spiritual dispute among Sufis.

The Mahabharata was Brook’s eleven-hour stage adaptation of the massive, epic cornerstone of Hindu literature, religion and culture, originally produced in French in 1985 and performed in English for a 1987 world tour that included the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theatre (now The Harvey). The production dramatized the epic’s main storyline—the tale of an ancient, high-cast dynastic conflict involving two opposed camps of cousins, the Pandavas (“sons of light”) and the Kauravas (“sons of darkness”). Brook speaks at length below about this conflict, using the story’s villains, the Kauravas, as a trope for all that remains irresolvable between nations, ethnicities and religions. He has always felt that the core questions in The Mahabharata touch on ethical, spiritual, social and historical dilemmas basic to all humankind. His production—which he adapted into a film in 1989 (available on DVD)—received mostly enthusiastic reviews during its international tour. In New York, however, it also encountered skepticism and, in some quarters, outright hostility; at issue was the ethics of Brook’s interculturalism, which some condemned as Orientalism and cultural piracy. Over the past twenty-five years Brook has said little about this heated dispute, but here he offers some candid remarks about it. The interview was taped on April 25, 2010, in New York City.

How do you think back on The Mahabharata?

I don’t. I don’t think of any of the things I’ve done in the past. I’m only interested in what re-emerges in the present.

Is that really true?

Absolutely. The one thing that I often come back to is the Bhagavad-Gita, because it’s the pearl at the heart of The Mahabharata. It is one of the great expressions of human understanding, which cuts through every tradition: Christianity, Judaism, Islam. The essential meaning is in the Gita. Hinduism in that way is the founder religion, because its values have degraded ever since. In the Hinduism of The Mahabharata there is no question of good and evil. There is a question on the contrary of forces that are more and more chaotic and thus destructive, and there is a rising scale that sets true order against chaos. In Sanskrit there isn’t a word for evil. There is only non-good. It’s like the definition of darkness in present-day physics. Nobody can understand the nature of light in present-day physics, so darkness is considered non-light. There isn’t something in the universe called darkness which is an evil, black force. Night is when the day goes. Death is when the manifestations of life disappear. And all of this is in the heart of The Mahabharata. At the end it’s Krishna, I think, who says that “a...