Battlefield by Jean-Claude Carrière (review)

Thirty years after bringing the complex, nine-hour The Mahabharata to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Peter Brook, his frequent collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, and musician Toshi Tsuchitori returned with Battlefield. In contrast to the earlier production, which included over twenty actors, 20,000 pounds of mud, and a ring of fire, Battlefield was fairly minimalistic, featuring just four actors performing on a bare, umber-textured stage that contained sticks, a low box on wheels, and two pieces of fabric. Beginning near the end of The Mahabharata’s storyline, the performance invited spectators to contemplate war as a plague that infects victors and losers alike. As Brook observed in the production’s program, its central protagonists—two kings who struggle with the costs of violence—also provide important lessons for contemporary leaders.

The production employed spare visual aesthetics to sharpen focus on the play’s central story and themes. The performers, for example, wore simple black pants and shirts, adding a single element to differentiate various characters: a yellow scarf for the god Krishna, a brown coat for King Yudhishthira, a large golden shawl for the great warrior Bhisma. These same costume pieces served to streamline transformations, as when Bhisma died, an actor was covered with the golden shawl and emerged as Krishna. Piles of sticks (perhaps an homage to their frequent use in The Mahabharata) were sparingly employed in Battlefield, as when two bamboo sticks became a scale to weigh the flesh of a pigeon against that of a king. Phillippe Vialatte’s lighting seldom drew attention to itself, except in two moments when red light flooded the stage as characters gave themselves to death so as to be reborn.

The production’s aural aesthetics were also stark. Tsuchitori provided the heartbeat of the production on a single instrument, the djembe. Music and voice combined to create a ritualistic sound. The actors’ vocal delivery was deliberate, with significant pauses and little emotion. This aural and visual simplicity was occasionally punctuated by sudden and startling contrast, such as in the scene following Bhisma’s death, which featured his mother, Ganga, wailing loudly in sorrow. Her red, kimono-like robe was employed like the handheld curtain (javanika) used in traditional Sanskrit theatre. Such moments prevented the audience from falling too deeply into the soothing rhythm of meditation, and brought us back into the realm of active contemplation.

Sean O’Callaghan, Jared McNeill, Ery Nzaramba, and Carole Karemera in Battlefield. (Photo: Richard Termine.)

To create this postwar, minimalist fugue, a few lines of The Mahabharata joined with new stories from the Hindu epic. The episodic structure of the script repeatedly drove home the idea that war’s aftermath means universal defeat. The kings (Brook’s stand-in for today’s leaders) were taught stark lessons of personal loss. Dhritarashtra was coolly informed, “[t]he destruction of your sons was inevitable.” The victorious king’s mother, Kunti (Carole Karemera), informed Yudhishthira that Karna, a great enemy, was in fact his elder brother. The kings, having grappled with war’s aftermath, found reconciliation. However, in Battlefield, as in life, reconciliation was not the end of the journey to understanding but the beginning.

While The Mahabharata foregrounded spectacle, it was lessons that mattered most in Battlefield. Bhisma, sitting on a box covered in a large shawl, offered instruction to Yudhishthira through a series of lively, sometimes humorous stories about dharma (the way of life and the moral order of the universe), as well as the duties of a ruler. Playing both human and animal characters, four fables—about a snake whose destiny was to kill a boy; a ruler who gave his life for that of a bird; a worm who treasured his lowly life; and a man who relished honey even in the face...