“Battlefield”:
Theater director distills earlier work into ‘Battlefield’
Portions of ancient Indian epic distilled into 70-minute work at ACT.
Commonly touted as the greatest living theater director, Peter Brook might be more impressively labeled as the greatest working one. At 92, the British author, filmmaker and master of the stage, Brook is still on the move.
His latest production, “Battlefield” — a 70-minute distillation of portions of the ancient Indian epic “The Mahabharata,” which Brook first brought fully to the stage to acclaim in 1985 — has been touring internationally since its Paris premiere in 2015, and is at American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater through May 21.
In contrast to the sprawling nine-hour eponymous production of “The Mahabharata” Brook staged in a quarry over 30 years earlier (and a Brook-directed film version in 1989), “Battlefield” is a minimalist, four-person one-act observing the aftermath of a great war for a throne that has left hundreds of millions dead. The victor and new king, Yudhishthira, searches for wisdom as he struggles to find solace in his crown amid the resulting bloodshed.
Adapted and directed by Brook and his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, the work has played in small and large venues alike, including schools and prisons, and Brook will continue to traverse the globe with the production after its San Francisco run.
“We go where we’re invited,” Brook says. “We never say, ‘Take us.’
“This is perhaps the first les-
son I learned in the theater: If you are lucky enough to do something that really seems to touch people, it’s your responsibility to go on playing it as long as there are people who call for it.”
This mentality is perhaps what has fueled Brook to continue creating after a decadeslong career that has carved out some of modern theater’s singularly seminal moments: from the first English-language production of “Marat/Sade” in 1964 to the theatrical landmark of his 1970 radical rendition of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which came to ACT in 1973. Brook’s “The Mahabharata” was hailed for wrestling the epic, known as the longest poem ever, into a groundbreaking theatrical event.
But Brook, soft-spoken and unassuming, pays no mind to intimations of a grand legacy.
“F— that,” says the 92-year old with a cheeky smile. “My legacy is what at this moment I can bring.”
Neither does Brook care to assess the state of theater; to prognosticate on the future of the stage is like asking a chef to explain the future of food, Brook says. The present moment, the “here and now,” is where he resides and the space in which all theater exists.
“That’s why for us on tour, what happened last week, what happened in Washington, what happened in Madrid — these are all very rewarding and splendid experiences. But they’re over,” Brook says. “Tomorrow we will begin again. And it’s always — ‘begin again, now.’ ”
It may come as a surprise then that “Battlefield” draws again from the epic Sanskrit text Brook has explored before. But “Battlefield” is a far cry from his dusk-to-dawn 1985 work. The new one-act is sparsely staged, in contrast to earlier portions of Brook’s career that played with technical innovation and, Brook says, focused on imagery.
But the simplicity is not a starting point. “You have to go through excess of every sort,” he says. “I gradually discovered that the richest material was inside the human being. So then, my interest went more and more to the actors, a treasure trove of richness.”
Brook prefers to think of “The Mahabharata” as revisiting him and Estienne rather than the vice versa. The immediate themes of “Battlefield,” the consequences of war and the arbitrary meaning of ‘victory’ in its context, sprang up for Brook against the current backdrop of mass death such as that in the Syrian war.
The inspiration was found in the epic poem’s parallel to what Brook says is our modern responsibility to “do everything to our dying day to help rebuild the world.”
“What in this era of darkness and destruction, can possibly bring a glimmer of hope into the world?” Brook poses. “What can give one the courage to say, ‘No we mustn’t give up — we must go on?’ ”
But Brook in no way sees a stage production as a harbinger of revolutionary change, nor does he wish to say what reading ought to be made or what answers, if any, to expect from “Battlefield.” As one of theater’s loftiest figures, Brook adamantly shirks the role of the sage analyzing the stage or his works.
“I’m not here with a message. I’m not here to think I know better than anyone else,” Brook says. “But I do think that something emerges when things are shared. That’s what we were looking for (during the early days of Brook’s troupe, International Centre for Theatre Research) in an African village, an Iranian village, the streets of Brooklyn … where we feel for a moment something of meaning is being lived together.”
Works that are true and sincere, Brook says, unite an audience whose members invariably carry a set of differences and frustrations. “And living that strong experience together, when they come out, they don’t come out defeated. They come out with a little more courage than when they came in.”
As for what has kept him to this form of connection for decades, Brook cannot say except to feel useful to others if capable. But will there come a time when the stalwart steps away?
“Yeah,” Brook says and pauses for a while. “We’re all born to die. And the day will come when I’ll be taken away. That’s how it is.”