Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives

360 Pages·2022·126.946 MB·English

by  David Williams

Routledge Revivals
Peter Brook and the Mahabharata
First published in 1991, Peter Brook and the Mahabharata is a collection of
essays which contextualizes the production of Peter Brook’s The Mahabhar-
ata. Written by both scholars and collaborators on Brook’s production, these
essays seek not only to discuss such issues as the politics of theatre inter-
culturalism, but to describe the nature of the working process, and detail the
technical problems engendered by touring a production of this size and
complexity. Furnished with a new preface by the editor, the book continues
to be crucial research devoted to unravelling the mesmerising as well as
polarising enigma that is Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata. Thoroughly het-
erogenous and controversially irreverent, this book will be of interest to
students of theatre, performance art, literature, South Asian studies and
media studies.

Peter Brook and the
Mahabharata
Critical Perspectives
Edited by David Williams
f) Routledge
* S m fj Taylor £*. Francis Gro
First published in 1991
by Routledge
This edition first published in 2022 by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1991 The collection, David Williams
Individual chapters, the respective authors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points
out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes
correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.
A Library of Congress record exists under ISBN: 0415047773
ISBN: 978-1-032-33493-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-32041-8 (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-34072-2 (pbk)
Book DOI 10.4324/9781003320418
PETER BROOK AND
THE MAHABHARATA
Critical Perspectives
Edited by
David Williams
London and New York
First published 1991
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1991 The collection, David Williams
Individual chapters, the respective authors
Phototypeset by Intype, London
Printed in Great Britain by
T J Press (Padstow) Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Peter Brook’s Mahabharata : critical perspectives.
1. Theatre. Brook, Peter
I. Williams, David
792.95
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Peter Brook’s Mahabharata : critical perspectives / edited by David Williams
p. cm.
Includes bibliograpbical references and index.
1. Carrière, Jean-Claude, Mahabharata. 2. Carrière, Jean-Claude-Stage history.
3. Brook, Peter. I. Williams, David
PQ2663.A78M3436 1991
792.9’2-dc20 91-8195
ISBN 0-415-04777-3
ISBN 0-415-04778-1 (pbk)
To the memory of Brenda Williams
(1927-1988):
The unreal has no being,
The real never ceases to be.
(The Mahabharata)
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. . .
(Dylan Thomas)
And if you cannot be saints of knowledge, at least be its
warriors. They are the companions and forerunners of such
sainthood
. . .
(Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)
Peut-être me direz-vous: ‘Es-tu sûr que cette légende soit la
vraie?’ Qu’importe ce que peut être la réalité placée hors de
moi, si elle m’a aidé à vivre, à sentir que je suis et ce que
je suis.
(Baudelaire)
PREFACE
‘The present is sometimes very ancient’, Jean-Claude Carrière
I first saw the French-language premiere of Peter Brook’s production
of The Mahabharata at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris in 1986, as a wide-
eyed 28-year-old setting out on a working life as an academic and
performance maker. In recent days, and for the first time in years, I
have revisited that period and the materials collected in this book,
uncovering and reawakening a kind of time capsule from over thirty
years ago. Inevitably, this burrowing return to a previous life has given
rise to all sorts of reflections on the intervening years, and tentative
attempts to tease out some of the continuities and changes.
Broadly, this book endeavoured to assemble a wide range of voices
and perspectives on a celebrated, large-scale international theatre
production that had become central to emergent debates about theatre
interculturalism. Practitioners detailing the project’s conception, aims
and collaborative working processes; a description of the performance
as live event, focusing on its scenographic and dramaturgical fluidity;
and several contradictory critical perspectives in the wake of a world
tour, reflecting something of the diversity of responses. I had been
watching and writing about Brook’s work in Paris for several years,
admiring it greatly; and the intimate immensity of this production
seemed to me a summation of that work, an immersive labour of love
by artists in their prime.
The Mahabharata came to fruition at a time when the conceptual
ground of intercultural performance was shifting seismically from the
universalizing assumptions of a Western liberal humanism towards
postcolonialism’s radical reappraisals. I remain committed to these
timely and essential critical realignments, despite the fact that their
contesting urgency sometimes took the form of personalized
denigrations in which some of what seemed to be most informative
within the work itself risked being lost. And in retrospect, at the time
of these earlier dissenting attempts to decolonize the practices of
liberal European culture - exposing the violence and inequity of its
repressed histories, power relations, extractive appropriations,
stereotypical representations – I felt that some of the heated exchanges