Brook’s prisoner leaves me longing for freedom
PETER Brook, aged 93, has co-written and co- directed a Beckettian play about a murderer, Mavuso, who is condemned to 20 years not in clink.
Instead he must squat on a hill opposite a white-walled prison in some undefined, possibly African or Asian desert. There he sits for years and years, staring, staring.
And we, poor saps of the audience, are condemned to watch this stuff for minutes and minutes (about 75 in all). Long before the end you will certainly empathise with this killer.
Paris-based Mr Brook is much prized by the Establishment. Wonderful, wonderful Peter. Greatest director in the English language, such an intellectual, etc. He was there last night, being fussed over by two Francophone women who were patting his grey hair as though he were some gaseous old family lurcher. He was lapping up this and numerous other salaams. Who can blame him? It must be wonderful to have lasted so long, to have pumped out so much existential angst, often with public subsidies, and find the pencil-suckers still haven’t called your bluff.
Scintillating, this fable is not. The pace is glacial as it puts across the tedium of Mavuso’s existence. The stage is empty save for a few tree stumps. The actors go barefoot. Always a bad sign.
Is the story maybe a little patronising? Mavuso (Hiran Abeysekera) has killed his father after finding him in bed with his daughter Nadia (Kalieaswari Srinivasan). Mavuso also lusts after Nadia, even though she is his sister. No one seems terribly offended by this incest. Well, that’s Abroad for you, Mavis.
The role of jurist falls to Mavuso’s Uncle Ezekiel (Herve Goffings), full of traditional lore and cryptic pronouncements. At the start we are introduced to a dwarf but he has the, er, shortest of appearances. Throw in some Third Worldish chants (quite engaging), a dead rat (Mavuso kebabs it) and an old white man (Donald Sumpter) who does some narration and exploration.
A collector’s item.