Peter Brook to return to the Mahabharata for new play, Battlefield

Peter Brook is to return to one of his most celebrated productions with a new play drawing on a section of the ancient Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata.

The director’s nine-hour production of the Mahabharata 30 years ago has gone down in theatre history as one of the greatest and, if you were there, memorable productions of all time.

Marie-Hélène Estienne, a long-time collaborator who worked as Brook’s assistant on the Mahabharata in the 1980s, said it would be impossible to stage in its entirety again.

But she, Brook and writer Jean-Claude Carrière have returned to the 3,000-year-old text for a new play called Battlefield which draws on one section in which the Bharata family is torn apart by war and trying to make sense of the horrors they have experienced – and perpetrated.

“It has come back again I think because of the situation of the world,” said Estienne. “The Mahabharata is not moralistic, it is fact. The moral, the good or bad, is not really there, it is another matter – a matter of what you have to do.”

The play is co-produced by the Young Vic in London where it will be staged next year from 3-27 February.

David Lan, the theatre’s artistic director, said he was delighted to be staging the new play which explores the “contemporary immediacy” of one of the Mahabharata’s many stories. He added: “Peter and his team are among our closest theatre friends.”

Battlefield, which uses four actors (Carole Karemera, Jared McNeill, Ery Nzaramba and Sean O’Callaghan), will open at Brook’s spiritual home, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris – which he ran for more than 30 years – before going on an international tour taking in London, Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Amiens in France and Rome, Modena and Florence in Italy.

It is a play which will ask profound questions about life, but mainly death, said Estienne.

Brook, who turned 90 this year, lost his wife of more than six decades, the actor Natasha Parry, last week. He directed his first play in London in 1943 and his production of the Mahabharata is “acknowledged as one of the seminal works of the 20th century”, said Lan.

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The original production opened at the Festival d’Avignon before touring the world for four years, produced in cities including New York and Glasgow, where the need to create a vast 360 square metre stage led to the formation of the arts space Tramway. It was the only UK production of Brook’s epic and required 250 tonnes of sand, 140 tonnes of clay and cost an estimated £350,000 to stage.

Brook made a six-hour film version in 1989.

Estienne said it had been a challenge to raise the money 30 years ago. “I remember very well that we had to do Carmen on tour to pay for the Mahabharata, we had to tour and tour and tour. It is not possible to do such a thing again, it could not be done better.”

Battlefield was announced by the Young Vic as it revealed details of some of its 2016 highlights.

Also in February, in its Maria studio, will be Annie Ryan’s adaptation of Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing which won several literary prizes in 2014 including the Baileys women’s prize for fiction.

The play premiered in Dublin last year to glowing reviews and will be part of the Traverse theatre’s Edinburgh festival programme next month.

Mike Bartlett’s Olivier award-winning play Bull, in which an office becomes a corporate bullring, will also return to the Maria – where it quickly sold out – for a limited run between 11 December 2015 and 9 January 2016.

Tickets go on sale for friends of the Young Vic on 29 July and to the wider public on 5 August.