At the epic’s end

A stark stage the colour of red earth; scarce props: bamboo sticks, a low stool, lengths of cloth — shawls in red, blue and yellow — in heaps; a lone musician stage left. Toshi Tsuchitori remains on stage throughout, his virtuoso drumming an accompaniment to the action. The backdrop to the stage, like the kurta-pyjama of the actors, is black.

Blind Dhritarashtra, played by Sean O’Callaghan (the only Caucasian cast member), enters. It is Kurukshetra in the immediate aftermath of the war. Dhritarashtra laments his role. “War,” he cries, is all that Duryodhana would have and he had not stopped him. Yudhishthira, played by Jared McNeill, enters next, equally horrified at the destruction. The battlefield is strewn with corpses, millions and millions of them. Dogs and carrion pick at them, women try to piece together the dismembered parts of their loved ones. The corpses are not there of course, but we see them nonetheless. For Yudhishthira “this victory is a defeat”; how can he become king? The opening of Battlefield , performed at the Young Vic Theatre in London, feels something like the end of King Lear .

Thirty years ago, British theatre director Peter Brook staged a legendary nine-hour production of the Mahabharata , followed several years later by a film adaptation, shorter, but still approaching four hours, with a vast cast. Now in his nineties, Brook — in partnership with his long-time collaborator Marie-Helene Estienne — has returned to the epic but to present a distilled, pared-down slice of it. At a compact 65 minutes and with a cast of only four actors playing three main characters — Yudhishthira, Dhritarashtra and Kunti — along with a host of other people and animals, Battlefield focuses on what happens at the end of the war. It follows the characters as they come to terms with the annihilation and dramatises key scenes through to the end of the epic.

After the wide-angled descriptions of the battlefield, the play zooms in. In a moving scene, Kunti, played by Carole Karemera, instructs Yudhishthira to perform oblations for Karna. Why? he asks. In her hands the red shawl becomes the infant Karna put forth in a basket on the Ganga. And as Kunti relates her story we witness Yudhishthira’s agonising realisation that he and Karna were brothers. Another close-up: Yudhishthira cradles Duryodhana (played by Ery Nzaramba, who switches nimbly from character to character) on the battlefield as he dies. “No good man is entirely good; no bad man is entirely bad,” whispers Yudhishthira as Duryodhana breathes his last.

Nzaramba becomes Bhishma waiting for his death — not perforated with arrows but seated sage-like, centre-stage, swathed in the yellow shawl.

The dharma sermon of the epic becomes three lively parables in which the actors take on the parts of animals. In the story of righteous king Shibu, Karemera is a wide-eyed pigeon, O’Callaghan a predatory falcon and two bamboo sticks become the scales on which the king weighs his own cut-away flesh against the pigeon. O’Callaghan is the worm (the red shawl becomes his body) who argues for the dignity of his worm-life before being crushed by a chariot wheel. All four actors flit from role to role in argument over who or what caused the death of Gautami’s child. Was it the snake that poisoned him? Was it Yama-Death? Was it Kala-Time? Finally they conclude it was his ‘destiny’ to die.

The directors’ note describes the Mahabharata as “an immense canvas covering all aspects of human existence. In it we find all the questions of our lives, in a way that is at once contemporary and urgent.” Why has Brook returned to it now? Does this Indian epic ‘canvas’ most effectively describe certain truths that Brook, now in his tenth decade, has learnt about the world? The futility of war but its endless perpetuation, the difficulty of right action, of ‘doing good’ (to borrow from Gurcharan Das), the moral shades of grey we walk among — the fact that we are all somehow always implicated.

All of this comes across in Battlefield — and very effectively for a Western audience still mostly ignorant of classical Indian culture. I’m not Indian but I have some acquaintance with this culture, and aspects of Battlefield irked. While there are obvious advantages of a small cast — not least that the production can and is going to travel — we lose characters of significance. There are no Pandava brothers in Battlefield except Yudhishthira. There is no Draupadi. Gandhari is missing from two of the most compelling scenes in the second half of the production — the departure of Dhritarashtra and Kunti for the forest and their later walk towards the flames.

More irksome perhaps is that in the impulse to universalise the story for a global audience we lose ideas. Dharma, a concept at the heart of the story and of Indian culture, is in the play (sometimes as itself, sometimes lost in translation) but no one not previously acquainted with it will come out any the wiser as to its meaning. These quibbles aside, Battlefield remains a powerful and memorable piece of theatre. It will be interesting to see how it is received in India.

( Battlefield opens at the NCPA, Mumbai on March 5).

Charty Dugdale is a writer based in London

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