DIRECTOR BROOK GETS DOWN TO THE Q&A; OF IT

British director Peter Brook is headquartered in Paris where he heads his Centre International de Creations Theatrales, under whose auspices “The Mahabharata” was developed over the last 10 years. Joyce Reed of Los Angeles interviewed him in Avignon.

W hy did you decide to do “The Mahabharata” as a theatrical production?

Because I think that the only thing that matters in the theater is that the material should be interesting. The most interesting material that I’ve encountered over a number of years is “The Mahabharata.”

Was there something in the legend that had a universal, modern relevance for you?

Different myths swim to the forefront at different moments of human history and at different moments of a person’s life. Now this myth has a million themes but at the core of it, there is one theme that predominates--the theme of conflict. For this reason alone, “The Mahabharata” is close to our time.

I first encountered “The Mahabharata” in fact when I was working on a piece on the Vietnam War and the relevance was apparent--already there. Today, this enormous epic dealing with every shade--from the psychological to the cosmic--of the question of what is conflict , clearly concerns not just me, but all of us.

The other theme that concerns us is that “The Mahabharata” is a story told to someone. It is told to a young man in the original epic to help him understand how to become a king--which really means how to grow up, how to face life and, I think, how to live rightly in troubled times. It was the theme 3,000 years ago and is once again the theme today.

What happened in the process of bringing the story to the stage?

We (Brook and collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere) first heard “The Mahabharata” the way an Indian hears it from his mother--it was told to us (by Sanskrit scholar Philippe Lavastine--Editor.) So we had images in our minds that didn’t come from reading something on the printed page.

From that, we began to talk about “The Mahabharata”--just the characters, the incidents, the dramatic nature of the material. Then we started reading it together in different translations over many months, noting different scenes, different portions, underlining different phrases.

The next stage was going to India--to go to the source, to look at India from the point of view of the continuity of Indian life through the life on the streets today, the India of 3,000 years ago that you can still find in the temples. India as it expresses itself through its enormous variety of creative arts.

Then there was the stage of making certain practical experiments. We had a workshop at our theater in Paris in which we explored with fragmentary scenes that Jean-Claude wrote for the first time, different styles of playing with people of different nationalities, with musicians, with dancers.

We had a Kathakali teacher who came and spent several months with us. One day on tour in Costa Rica, we suddenly did, for an audience of children, an improvisation of one of the scenes from “The Mahabharata.” So that this many-sided work was being approached over the years from many, many different directions.

Then in our sequence of journeys to India, we started taking with us key people; certain actors, designer, musicians. One of our musicians, Toshi Tsuchitori, our Japanese percussion player and musical director, stayed for a year in India going from place to place, studying Indian music.

We did what we always do with a new production, which is to play it quietly without anybody knowing about it to preview audiences; to continue to develop the show, and for two months at the Bouffes du Nord we played previews. Each play had about eight previews with spaces in between so that we could continue working. That was the preparation.

Some production elements are repeated in your work--in “The Ik” and “Carmen,” the use of sand and fire; now in “The Mahabharata,” sand and fire and water.

If you’d seen “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Conference of the Birds,” you would have found carpets. It depends on what a subject demands. When you start a production, you have to put everything in question. If you go into a theater and it has a wooden floor, you can’t take that for granted. You have to say “is this wooden floor going to bring to the person standing on it the right support?” Maybe yes, maybe no.

We’ve had concrete floors, we’ve had brick floors and tiled floors and carpets and earth. What is necessary is that there should be a good relation between the actor, the subject and what he is standing on.

It’s quite clear that with “The Ik,” as a story about Africa, and with “The Mahabharata,” we are working with cultures whose life comes from a relationship with nature and (which) take their reality out of the actors standing on earth, being related to the elements, to fire and to water. It’s part of the storytelling.

Again, the central character in “Carmen” is a Gypsy. The essence of Gypsy life is a relationship, not with air conditioning and central heating, but with the nature.

Consider what you are doing with “The Mahabharata” and what was done with “Roots” -- it’s as though there is a need to go back and retranslate the past in forms that people can touch now.

Yes. It is very important at this moment of the 20th Century to look at the world with one’s eyes open. Having been brought up at the end of an era that believed in progress, one can now see that there is something equally clear-cut that has happened, and that is degeneracy. It’s not just that the head and the heart haven’t caught up with one another, or that we haven’t caught up with scientific discoveries, but something very, very much more basic.

Over the last 3,000 years the world has gradually, in most places, declined. But there are certain places--what one calls traditional societies--in Africa, East and West, where certain human, social and spiritual values are maintained in a stronger state than in the rest of the world. And there are certain ancient works where one finds a level of simple knowledge and understanding that is higher than what anyone of us is capable of today.

It would be marvelous if by commissioning a young playwright today, he could produce “The Mahabharata” and outdo it. Realistically, one knows that this is stupid. In the same way that one knows that there is no contemporary painter or sculptor who could do the Sphinx. There isn’t a contemporary musician who is capable of doing an inch towards the great achievements of the past.

This is not a reason for facile pessimism or despair. All the research must go on; present-day musicians must try to make their music; painters must do their best. But they must keep this simple humility to say, “I respect the fact that there was a greater civilization in relation to real values in the past.”

Bringing the past into the present is not to give up the present, but to be constantly helped at a moment of degeneracy to stand firm and to hold enough together to reach the point when, hopefully, the cycle, having reached its lowest point, begins to rise again--without giving oneself false arrogance and false complexes towards the past. When you go back far enough, you come to the real living tradition. It’s a source of life for us today.

What do you see for “The Mahabharata” in the future?

We’re going to play it as fully as we can in its original French version because without the French Government, the French Ministry of Culture, the French attitude towards other cultures, it could never have happened. Towards the end of next year, we are going to do an English version . . . for the United States and India, amongst other places.