Rare magic as we’re shown another kind of theatre

Battlefield is the latest work brought to our shores by our greatest theatrical pioneer and (nominal) exile, the Paris-based director Peter Brook. It roams the nooks and crannies of The

Mahabharata, the Indian epic that Brook staged in a nine-hour adaptation 30 years ago, and has the heady quality of a voyage into the unknown.

Plunging us into the aftermath of the great war between the Pandavas and their cousins the Kauravas, it combines bleak visions of apocalypse with storytelling interludes aglow with comic levity – vignettes involving a fatalistic worm, a disputatious snake, a materialistic mongoose and a king who cuts off his own flesh to ascertain the weight of a pigeon. In terms of scale, it’s an acorn beside

The Mahabharata’s mighty oak – requiring just four barefoot actors (accompanied by Toshi Tsuchitori, a dab hand on a drum) and stretching to just over an hour. Parched of contextual information, and with the translation at times bordering on the monsoon side of heavy-weather (“I want to attain through penance the regions of felicity”), you could disengage, or even sneer. Yet go with the flow, and you might – as I did – enter a different zone, getting a potent glimpse of another way of doing theatre, of looking at life, even at the end a fleeting intimation of some “cosmic” otherness.

Much of this is down to the luminous charm of the players, adorned as simply as their surroundings. Brook, at 90, has long since forsworn lavish stagecraft, instead developing what you might call “sage-craft”. The multi-ethnic actors are often still and contemplative as they talk, quasi-naive yet imbued with wisdom.

If this proves to be Brook’s swansong, know that he achieves rare magic, and with the slenderest art.