‘Battlefield’ is another classic
70-minute play by stage legend Brook still feels epic in scope
SAN FRANCISCO — We join the story after it’s already over. A fierce war has been fought, and the survivors on both sides are left to pick up the pieces. That’s the scene in the aptly titled “Battlefield” at American Conservatory Theater, the great British stage director Peter Brook’s return to the world of one of his most acclaimed works, “The Mahabharata.”
Written by Jean-Claude Carriere and directed by Brook, the play “The Mahabharata” was originally performed in French in 1985, with an international cast in a quarry outside Avignon. It was nine hours long, 11 if you counted the breaks between acts. A 1989 TV miniseries in English reduced the length to six hours, and later that footage was chopped down further to become a threehour feature film.
Of course, the story is much older and much longer than that. One of the great Sanskrit epics of India, the Mahabharata is estimated to date from almost 2,500 years ago, telling a story that’s older still. The longest epic poem ever written, the Mahabharata consists of about 1.8 million words, variously estimated to be seven to 10 times as long as Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” combined.
Brook’s new take on the “Mahabharata” story, adapted and directed with his longtime collaborator Marie-Helene Estienne, “Battlefield” premiered in 2015 in London, 30 years after his original exploration of the ancient material. Clocking in at a mere 70 minutes without intermission, “Battlefield” necessarily tells only a fraction of the story. Interestingly, the part it explores is very near the end of the epic.
A bloody war has just ended, and the defeated king and the victorious one lament the carnage of the battlefield, which is described in detail. We see none of this, because the stage is bare aside from scattered bamboo staves and a drum, which is played by musician Toshi Tsuchitori sparingly and compellingly throughout the piece.
It centers around the haunting guilt of the victor, the virtuous Yudhishthira (quietly introspective Jared McNeill), who has to be convinced by many philosophical dialogues to stick around and be king instead of running off to the forest.
Some of the pleas come from his just-defeated enemies. His uncle, the blind king Dhritarashtra (mournful Sean O’Callaghan) just had a hundred sons die in battle against Yudhishthira’s forces but bears no grudge and just wants to help the new king adjust to his role. The very slowly dying Bhishma (versatile Ery Nzaramba, who plays many roles in the story), erstwhile commander of the opposing forces, also offers sage advice, in the form of a string of funny fables acted out by the cast (one of these fables even features someone telling a story within the story within the story).
The play omits many characters important to the overall epic, some of whom would certainly still be around at this point in the story. Even so, previous familiarity with the source material (or with earlier versions of Brook’s “Mahabharata”) would help tremendously to keep track of who’s who and contextualize what they’re talking about. Yudhishthira’s mother, Kunti (somber Carole Karemera), reveals that his dead enemy Karna was in fact his brother, but the impact is at best abstract if you don’t know Karna, who was dead when we got here.
While grief plays a large role in this aftermath, the play is much more about coming to terms with destiny and duty, and that comes through in its many discussions and parables. Brook’s staging is beautifully spare, with just four actors and the musician bringing the story to vibrant life. The power of storytelling is a central theme of the piece, and the stripped-down performance style elegantly illustrates that. The unknowable vastness that it points to is an essential part of the experience.