A Magician Of Space Who Knew There’s No Final Truth

Peter Brook’s Mahabharat, like all his theatre, was an epical version of the human condition

- Ashok Vajpeyi

Peter Brook is best known in India for his monumental production of the Mahabharat, which premiered at the Festival D’Avignon in 1985 as a ninehour theatrical presentation. I was lucky enough to have been invited to the premiere and it took place in a stone quarry, giving the play a prehistoric setting.

The play itself seamlessly merged the mythical and the real. It was presented as an eternal saga of all humanity, although told movingly in India. And it was only this spectacular presentation which made me, an Indian, realise that the Mahabharat does indeed contain all of human history; that which is not in Mahabharat exists nowhere else!

In fragmented times, a theatre of connections: 21 actors from 16 countries, some doing more than one role, enacted a human narrative of epic dimensions, embodying the human predicament, follies, aspirations and failures, the human grandeur and beauty, the betrayals and contradictions, the violence and vainness, all of the human triumphs and defeats.

In times which were fragmented and deeply wounded Peter Brook tried to create a theatre which would heal and assure us of survival with dignity. When a great poet was wailing that he could “connect nothing with nothing”, Brook sought to evolve a theatre that would connect our times to past times, history to myth, failure to significance.