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    Peter Brook's Woman in Mahabharata
    Peter Brook's Woman in Mahabharata
    Peter Brook's Woman in Mahabharata
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Peter Brook's Woman in Mahabharata

    By Indrajit Bandyopadhyay

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    About this ebook

    The book analyses in details how Peter Brook portrays the major woman characters of Mahabharata in his theatre and screen-play 'The Mahabharata.' The author compares Brook's portrayal with the Mahabharata Text and finds that it is not so easy to depict the rich ambiguity of woman characters on stage, and this, despite the fact that the Text bears much affinity with Theatre. Despite his laudable attempt to capture Mahabharata and its Woman on stage, Brook's theatre falls short of the glorious ambiguity and complexity of the Woman of Mahabharata.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateDec 4, 2011
    ISBN9781105321085
    Peter Brook's Woman in Mahabharata

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      Book preview

      Peter Brook's Woman in Mahabharata - Indrajit Bandyopadhyay

      Peter Brook's Woman in Mahabharata

      Peter Brook's Woman in Mahabharata

      Indrajit Bandyopadhyay

      Copyright © 2011 Indrajit Bandyopadhyay

      All rights reserved.

      ISBN:  978-1-105-32108-5

      Dedication

      I dedicate this work to the lotus-feet of my father Shri Tarun Kumar Banerjee and my mother Smt. Pampa Banerjee

      Acknowledgments

      I express my gratitude and debt to K.M. Ganguly’s English Translation of Mahabharata. All excerpts of Mahabharata are taken from that translation. I also express my gratitude and debt to ‘The Machine-readable Text of the Mahabharata based on the Poona Critical Edition’, Produced by Muneo Tokunaga, Kyoto, Japan. I have taken all transcriptions from the net version

      Introduction

      ‘Peter Stephen Paul Brook CBE, director, filmmaker, author, painter, pianist and theater man to the bone, is a giant of world culture. Born on the spring equinox in 1925, Brook produced an acclaimed Faust at Oxford at 17 and at 20 became the youngest-ever director of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. He has since directed over 40 major stage productions, created ten films, and with multiple stage, cinema and television versions returned the dramaturgically languishing gods of India's Mahabharata to full-time international employment. Although he has produced works as varied and bizarre as Marat Sade, Lord of the Flies, Conference of the Birds, and The Ik, the Paris-base Brook constantly cycles back to the Shakespearean canon for renewal. His primary legacy to the modern stage is a sense of immediacy bordering on possession, taking theater back to the numinous ground where ritual, seance and coven convene.’[i]

      Brook originally produced a stage play on Mahabharata in 1985 that was 9 hours long, and toured around the world for four years. In 1989, it was reduced to less than 6 hours for television (TV mini series). Later it was also reduced to about 3 hours for theatrical and DVD release.[ii]

      The Screenplay is by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Marie-Helene Estienne; the Director of Photography is William Lubtchansky; the Editor is Nicolas Gaster, and the Film was Produced in Association with Denmark, Finland, Iceland, NEH, NEA.   

      The 1989 film version – The Mahabharata - is our present topic of discussion. It was made by Parabola Films in 1989, directed by Peter Brooks with an international crew, and distributed by an international group led by Reiner-Moritz Distributors.[iii]

      The background of Brook-Carrière’s project Mahabharata can be known from their own words. Both Carrière and Brook have spoken elaborately about the preparatory days of their Mahabharata-Project and the process of their theatric creation.

      They first began listening to the ‘stories of the Mahabharata’ from Philippe Lavastine, a professor in Sanskrit, in 1975. For 5 years they ‘met regularly…listening to the poem without reading it.’ Then Carrière started ‘taking notes’, and in 1976, he ‘started a first version of the play.’ They received advice from Madeleine Biardeau.

      After listening to ‘stories’ and receiving scholarly advice, they began to read.    

      Carrière and Brook could not read Mahabharata in Sanskrit, and so they depended on translations. At first, they read separately, Peter Brook read in English, and Carrière read in French,

      ‘and finally we began a long, slow study together, comparing translations, with the help of Marie-Helene Estienne. After these studies, which we pursued for almost 2 years, we traveled to India a number of times. We gathered all kind of images and impressions – images of dance, film, marionette theatre, village celebrations and plays.’[iv]

      Regarding their preparation, Brook writes:

      ‘This is where the ten years of preparation comes in. After our encounter with the Mahabharata orally, Jean-Claude wrote a first version-simple play length, two hours. He wrote without reference to any-thing except his own memory. We looked at this and said, This is an exercise between us. Now we really start work. Then began a process parallel with all the other work we were doing-reflecting lots of the work we'd done over the ten years. The Kerala Kalamandalam troupe gave us Kathakali workshops without costumes or makeup. We played Ubu to them and they played Mahabharata to us. Then we went to Costa Rica, where on a Saturday morning as a children's play we did our first public improvisation of The Game of Dice from the Mahabharata. There are five people in the company who remain from that. During that time Jean-Claude and I decided our basic through-line was to tell the Pandava-Kaurava story. In India they don't need this-everyone knows the basic story. They can perform variations and fragments. The second condition we gave ourselves was not to talk at all about length or a date for the premiere. Then we ran an international workshop mainly on the relation between certain kinds of music and the French text. For this Jean-Claude wrote his first fragments, two or three pages, a speech, some dialog that we sang to, danced to, and dramatized with or without music. After that began a series of journeys to India. For Mahabharata we did an enormous number of auditions. This was good for Jean-Claude because these auditions were working sessions. Every time he wrote a scene we could try it out, take it back, reject it, rewrite. He was rewriting through the whole rehearsal period. Which of course is terrifying for actors dealing with such an enormous package of material. They would master a scene, but Jean-Claude and I would arrive the next morning and say, Well, that scene's out. Through to today that's how we've been working.’[v]

      They also read a lot of interpretative works on Mahabharata. Carrière mentions to have ‘read a great deal during this time of research’, and particularly mentions …several short plays of Rabindranath Tagore, a brilliant essay by Iravati Karve called ‘Yuganta’, and a long series of Krishnavatara edited by K.M. Munshi, all of which were ‘most revealing’, and gave them ‘precious keys to meanings, and made possible a more subtle, deeper and in a way more realistic development of certain characters.’[vi]

      Carrière’s diary that accompanies the DVD box set (In Search of the Mahabharata: Notes of Travels in India with Peter Brook, 1982-1985) also testifies to the extent of research that went into Brook’s film and their experience during the research.

      ‘Carrière describes travels across India to watch a diverse range of performances of the Mahabharata—he and Brook watch

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