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In its blend of spectacle with simplicity, The Mahabharata recalls the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby and the medieval religious play cycle produced in 1985 by Britain's National Theater. Brook's stage blazes with light and color -- not from some high-tech console but from torches and candles and vivid carpets methodically unrolled across the ground. There are no turntables or massive set pieces, no cinematic special effects. The tone of the talk -- conversational but carefully not colloquial -- suggests listening to a tribal elder around the fire. Like the Bible, the Mahabharata is a creation epic stretching over generations. And like Nickleby, Brook's adaptation depicts how a man must unravel his heritage and true identity to break a cycle of suffering. After hours of battle and a description of a field strewn with 18 million corpses, the final scene shows orderly everyday life happily unfolding along a riverbank. But the narrator prepares the audience to disregard this vision with the warning that justice is merely another of life's illusions. In Western civilization, tragedy is defined by the Greek notion of a self-imposed flaw: it can be avoided. In The Mahabharata, the essence of tragedy is its inevitability. Even those who foresee what is coming simply submit to fate.
Brook inevitably simplifies the story and philosophy, at times verging on a kind of Eastern Philosophy's Greatest Hits glibness; the original epic's most famous section, the Bhagavadgita, is compressed into a few offhand remarks. The production is international in the best and worst senses: at times universal, at times merely polyglot. Brook, whose 1970 Midsummer Night's Dream reawakened audiences to the play's sexual and class anger and whose 1981 Carmen reduced Bizet's opera to a fervid 80 minutes, is British. Playwright Jean-Claude Carriere, author of many screenplays, including six for Luis Bunuel, is French. The 30 actors come from West Germany, Poland, Senegal, Trinidad, Turkey and Bali, among other places, and at least seven are making English-language acting debuts. Whatever the longueurs and idiosyncrasies, all cavils are minor. The work itself is major, a spellbinding journey through myth and fable, blessed with an unfailing sense of wonder.