The neverending battle

There's no typo here. Brook is not far from the century mark and thanks in major part to his longtime collaborator, Marie-Helene Estienne, who shares the directing and script adaptation credits, he hasn’t shown any sign of slowing down. “Battlefield” premiered at Paris’ Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, where Brook stepped down from the artistic directorship after almost four decades, and after travelling to many countries, enraptured the audience at the 44th Hong Kong Arts Festival last month.

Hearing that Brook and Estienne were adapting Jean-Claude Carriere’s play “Mahabharata”, many theatregoers thought that we would get to see a redux of Brook’s most famous nine-hour production from the 1980s. After learning that “Battlefield” would run for a little more than an hour, we then thought it was an abbreviated version of the Indian epic. In fact, it was neither of the above. Rather, Brook and Estienne focused on what happened after the great war in which the casualty toll reached 10 million. Through encounters with other characters who recounted allegorical tales and fables, the new king Yudishthira couldn’t really enjoy his victory with so great a loss, and meanwhile the defeated blind king Dritarashtra pondered if such a war could have been prevented in the first place. And with this title, the play had even more resonance – the most important part of any war is not the battle itself, but its aftermath. 

Just as Brook is a master storyteller, his four performers of different nationalities, namely Carole Karemera, Jared McNeill, Ery Nzaramba and Sean O’Callaghan also had a great time telling various tales and fables with highly efficient use of their limited set and hand props – fabrics and bamboo sticks. Manipulated in different ways by the actors, these turned into various objects and beings. Always present on the stage, Toshi Tsuchitori’s percussion became another character. In this almost empty space, the artists used plenty of their imagination and so did the audience. And in an era when our senses are being overloaded with visual images from social media, this was much needed.

Brook wrote that when his production of “Mahabharata” premiered at Festival d’Avignon in 1985, not many people knew how the title should be pronounced. Seated next to me at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre’s studio theatre last month, a woman taught her friend that the first two syllables should be pronounced as “Mahab” –silently I tried using the same criteria to pronounce my family name. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why in this age of information technology when we can easily access information on anything, we love going to the theatre, to watch and listen to stories we’re not yet familiar with and from which we can learn.

The tagline of the recently ended 44th HKAF was “What comes after”, and of course this “Battlefield” fit right in, asking us to think what came before and what is happening in a time when terrorism is never far from the headlines.

 

On the Web:

www.BouffesDuNord.com

www.HK.ArtsFestival.org