Battlefield

based on The Mahabharata and the play by Jean-Claude Carrière

seen at the Young Vic on 17 February 2016

The play is adapted and directed by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne with lighting by Philippe Vialatte, costumes by Oria Puppo and music by Toshi Tsuchitori. Sean O'Callaghan plays the blind king Dritarashtra, Jared McNeill the new king Yudishtira, Carole Karemera his mother, and Ery Nzaramba takes other parts (as do the rest of the cast).

Famously in the 1980s Peter Brook prepared a nine-hour production of The Marabharata which was performed outdoors so that its conclusion coincided with dawn. This new play lasts only 70 minutes and focuses on the aftermath of the crucial battle which occurs towards the end of the epic. Millions lie dead, including all the sons of the blind king (on one side) and all the brothers of the new king (on the other). Yet after all this mayhem we see only four actors and a musician on a bare stage with a few cloths and sticks for props, in an extraordinarily concentrated piece of staging.

Yudishtira feels reluctant to accept the kingship, even though his uncle and one time enemy Dritarashtra urges him to do so. As he prepares to perform the offerings to the dead, his mother urges him to include a rite for the dying general of Dritarashtra's defeated army. To Yudishtra's amazement, she reveals that this general, thought by all to be merely a peasant's son, was in fact her own first born son (engendered by a god), whom she abandoned in shame. So the great battle, already vitiated through being an affair of cousins, has now the added poignancy of being a struggle between half brothers; Yudishtira is just in time to bid his half brother farewell before he expires.

There follows an episode in which Yudishtira seeks to understand the workings of destiny and blame, as he is presented with a fable in which a woman will not take vengeance on a snake for killing her son. Next follows an episode in which he seeks reassurance about the just way to rule, told in a parable in which he divests himself of riches to an importunate beggar, but then commands him to redistribute these to the poor. (This proved quite difficult as the first three members of the audience, when asked if they were poor, denied that they were; luckily the third conceded that his neighbour was poor and she received all the goods, with instructions to make further redistributions 'to the poor people in the gallery'.) Finally he must allow his uncle and his mother to retreat to the forest to prepare for their deaths by penance and fasting; his own journey towards understanding involves being swallowed and spat out by a god, who then agrees to tell the king his name. This is whispered into silence; the audience does not hear it as the piece ends.

On a bare thrust stage covered in orange material, with only shifts in lighting to indicate new scenes, with music provided only by the rhythmic slap of fingers on a small drum, and with costumes of black or grey relieved by long scarves or cloaks in primary colours, attention naturally focuses on the performers and their skill in presenting the basic situation (the aftermath of a terrible battle) and negotiating the deep questions of fate, justice and mortality which preoccupy the survivors. Not only that, but the cultural expectation that such matters can be dealt with by diversionary stories, and that the close of life (if it is not brought about by death in battle) can be embraced as the climax of a move towards introspection and the renunciation of social and civilised life, must be made clear and convincing. 

This the four actors manage to do with commanding power and humanity. Carole Karemera, for example, relates the story of her abandoned first-born with tremendous dignity, transforming its somewhat melodramatic character into yet one more aspect of the complicated destiny that has dogged all the members of her family. Then as the mother in the story about the boy killed by a snake, she conveys perfectly the fatalism that allows her to grieve but not to be vengeful. 

The scenes between uncle and nephew (a weary and blind Sean O'Callaghan, and a perplexed and initially uncertain Jared McNeill), exhausted and at some level ashamed of their responsibilities for the war that has virtually exterminated their families, are conducted with a formal restraint and courtesy that allow us to accept that this is no blood and thunder piece, but rather a serious enquiry into the mystery of human existence, examining its aspirations as much as its failures. 

Though the sheer horror of the preceding battle was missing (mere references to 'millions of dead' being impossible to visualise), the predicament of the survivors was brilliantly evoked; and the seriousness of their purpose was nicely offset by the 'justice' parable, in which Ery Nzaramba displayed wonderful comic timing in dealing with a slightly bemused audience. As the god (Ery Nzaramba again) whispered his name to the young king, there was a spellbinding silence while we continued to ponder the remarkable spectacle we had witnessed.