Exiled from Alienation: Brechtian Aesthetics, the Death of the Director, and Peter Brook's The Mahabharata

Exiled from Alienation: Brechtian Aesthetics, the Death of the Director, and Peter Brook's The Mahabharata JAMES MARTIN HARDING Cenain to be counted among the many fIashpoints in the cultural wars of the late 1980s, Peter Brook's The Mahabharata occupies a unique and ultimately illuminating position in the history of theatre and perfonnance criticism. Stained by the lingering residues of its producer's gross and well-documented cultural insensitivities, Brook's The Mahabharata became a kind of pariah shonly after its premier.' That stain marks the history of the piece's reception and has resulted either in a consistent blurring of the production with its producer or in an implicit call to boycott the production as a way to hold Brook accountable for his indefensible behavior while in India researching his production. In either case, scholars have been unable or unwilling to move beyond considerations that are based on an equation of Brook's production with Peter Brook the person. While from a political standpoint such equations may initially be understandable, from a theoretical perspective they not only have been problematic from the very stan but also have inadvenently elided profoundly significant political ramifications in Brook's The Malzabharata, ramifications that become visible only if we make a clear break between Brook and his production. The justifications for such a break are to be found in the arguments of critical theory and poststructuralism. Deconstructive in their larger implications, those arguments are by no means an apology for Brook's personal politics or a reaffirmation of the expressed intentions of his adaptation. Nor are they an attempt to separate aesthetics and politics or, more specifically, an attempt to build an opposition between critical theory and cultural politics. On the contrary, a consideration of Brook's The Mahabharata within the context of critical theory and poststructuralism illuminates political undercurrents in Brook's adaptation that run directly counter not only to his own intent as a producer but also to the political and philosophical underpinnings of his critics. To claim that Brook's production has political implications that run counter Modern Drama, 44:4 (2001) 4[6 Exiled from Alienation 4'7 to his expressed intent may initially seem to reaffirm the views of those critics who argue that Brook's liberal humanistic agenda ultimately results in regressive and hegemonic cultural politics. While, at one level, the following arguments do in fact reaffirm such criticisms of Peter Brook the person, at a more fundamental level they are concerned with the manner in which the dynamics of Brook's The Mahabharata - irrespective of, indeed contrary to, the problematic humanistic underpinnings of Brook's stated objectives - pivot upon an identifiable Brechtian political aesthetic. As I will show, the political dimensions of that aesthetic are manifested in the piece's self-reflexive scrutiny of the processes of representation, in its profound questioning of notions of textual and cultural authority, and in its implicit, radical critique of identity politics. At the same time, the presence of this Brechtian aesthetic in The Mahabharata, inasmuch as it runs counter to Brook's directorial intent, raises fundamental questions about the intersection between Brechtian technique and poststructuralism. Indeed, my basic underlying assertion is that Brook's The Mahabharata ultimately illustrates how little critics have recognized that the intersection of Brechtian aesthetics with poststructuralism severs Brechtian technique and its concomitant political effects from a necessary dependence upon the conscious political intents of a playwright or director. Although not likely the product ofconscious design, the overlooked political dimensions of Brook's The Mahabharata are closely tied to the work of those who, at a time when other critics were taking Brook to task, were seeking to unite the arguments of postslTUcturalism and deconstruction with the legacies of Brechtian theatre.' Such efforts were not the only trends to develop as critical theory began to alter the course of theatre studies in the mid- and late 1980s, and that is part of the reason that scholars have not brought the combination of critical theory and Brechtian aesthetics to bear on analyses of Brook's piece. Such an explanation is at least implied by Una Chaudhuri's recent "Working Out (of) Place," which plots the...