The complicated legacy of Peter Brook

The British theatre directer known for his famous adaption of the Mahabharata died on Saturday

July 05, 2022 10:13 am | Updated 11:16 am IST - Melbourne

British theatre director Peter Brook. Known for an influential and distinguished career which saw him garner worldwide acclaim, Brook has died. He was 97

British theatre director Peter Brook. Known for an influential and distinguished career which saw him garner worldwide acclaim, Brook has died. He was 97 | Photo Credit: AP

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

So begins The Empty Space (1968) by the British theatre director Peter Brook, who died on Saturday, aged 97. He was famous for his adaptation of the Mahabharata.

Brook’s goal, as he put it, was to work “outside of contexts”, asking: “In what conditions is it possible for what happens in a theatre experience to originate from a group of actors and be received and shared by spectators without the help and hindrance of […] shared cultural signs and tokens?”

In 1979, Brook took his international troupe on a trip through Africa, presenting The Conference of the Birds, a play based on a 12th Century Persian poem, to audiences with whom they expected to have nothing in common.

This phase of what came to be called intercultural theatre culminated in a famous adaptation of The Mahabharata.

Yoshi Oida, Mallika Sarabhai, Andreas Katsulas, and Mireille Maalouf in Peter Brook’s “Mahabharata”.

Yoshi Oida, Mallika Sarabhai, Andreas Katsulas, and Mireille Maalouf in Peter Brook’s “Mahabharata”. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

Premiering at the Avignon festival in 1985 with a cast drawn from many cultures and theatrical traditions, the drama was praised by critics for its beauty and limpid theatricality of the production. However, it also triggered a critical backlash.

As Australians well know, there are no “empty spaces” that are simply there for the taking. There are no cultural forms that exist “outside of contexts”.

Brook was not naive about this, but he struggled to square local particularity with his universalist instincts. He acknowledged the Mahabharata “would never have existed without India”, yet at the same time, stated “we had to avoid allowing the suggestion of India to be so strong as to inhibit human identification to too great an extent.”

For a growing number of critics, this was not only intellectually unsustainable, but compounded historical wrongs.

In 1990, the Indian theatre scholar Rustom Bharucha published Theatre and the World, a broadside against western appropriations of Asian theatrical forms. Bharucha accused Brook of trivialising and decontextualising Indian culture, and exploiting Indian performers.

The Mahabharata would mark a significant shift in how intercultural collaborations would be approached in future: greater attention being paid to who has the right to represent what, and how the material and intellectual resources in any given production are distributed.

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