Battlefield E-Book

Peter Brook

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'Destruction never approaches weapon in hand. It comes slyly, on tiptoe, making you see bad in good and good in bad.' The devastation of war is tearing the Bharata family apart. The new king must unravel a mystery: how can he live with himself in the face of the devastation and massacres that he has caused. In Battlefield, the internationally renowned team of Peter Brook, Marie-Hélène Estienne and Jean-Claude Carrière revisit the great Indian epic The Mahabharata, thirty years after Brook's legendary production took world theatre by storm. An immense canvas in miniature, this central section of the ancient text is timeless and contemporary, asking how we can find inner peace in a world riven with conflict. It was first performed at Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris, in 2015, before an international tour including a run at the Young Vic Theatre, London, in 2016.

Leseprobe

BATTLEFIELD

from The Mahabharataand Jean-Claude Carrière’s play

directed and adapted byPeter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Original Production

Characters

Note on Text

Battlefield

About the Authors

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne

The origin of theatre in every culture is always storytelling. Whether in the family, in the village, in the courtyard of the temple, it is one person sharing a story with one group of avid listeners.

When Peter Brook and I, with Jean-Claude Carrière, went to India to prepare our nine-hour stage adaptation of The Mahabharata, we experienced directly how this vast, rich and complex epic had lived over a thousand of years through an unbroken chain of narrators.

Today, as always, the storyteller needs no more than a simple stick to bring to life armies, rivers, Heaven.

Gradually, over the centuries, this has developed through many other forms: dance, mime, song. To try, for an outsider, to imitate these forms is pretentious and often useless.

Now, feeling the need to bring the epic into today’s world where its questions are so passionately alive, we felt that the ending had to be explored in a different manner from the way it had been explored thirty years before. The question of how to reign when a terrible war is finished, leaving on the ground millions of corpses, when there are no more fathers, children, friends, allies, when they are all dead – how can the future king accept his mission, which is to be king? How can the old, blind king, his uncle, accept the situation, having lost his hundred sons, and all his warriors, teachers, generals? Where is Dharma, the divine law, the reason why the text has been written, to maintain its power on human beings, even if they forgot it?

With a small group of actors, putting their art at the service of the whole and with a musician using one unique instrument, we started our journey, from the battlefield to an unknown silence.

July 2017