FESTVAL: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTS : THE LONGEST STORY EVER TOLD : Translated from Sanskrit to French to English, compressed from more than 100,000 stanzas into nine hours of performance, ‘The Mahabharata’ is a massive stage marathon gleaned from a classic Indian poem

It took 10 centuries for “The Mahabharata” to achieve its present form. Peter Brook was quicker. It took the expatriate British director only 10 years to deliver a three-part, nine-hour stage version of this Indian masterwork.

Together with French writer and long-time associate Jean-Claude Carriere, Brook took the longest poem ever written, had it translated into French from the original Sanskrit (by hook and by crook, since neither he nor Carriere knows Sanskrit) and compressed its more than 100,000 stanzas into nine hours of performance. Thus was born the massive stage marathon, staged by Brook, that played to capacity audiences two years ago at Avignon and in Paris.

Now Brook, who has worked and resided in Paris for the past 19 years, has gone a step further. He has translated all nine hours of Carriere’s French script into English, and brings us his English version as the centerpiece of the Los Angeles Festival.

How did he and Carriere do it?

“The decision was simple,” says the 62-year-old Brook--a soft-spoken, mild-mannered man with translucent blue eyes, a pale pink face and hair fading to white. “It was clear that this was something of great antiquity and at the same time more contemporary than a play about the (hydrogen) bomb because it tells us about human nature, rather than human error.

“One (felt) like 19th-Century archeologists discovering a buried city,” he says, his hushed tones competing with the clatter of dishes and the hiss of espresso machines at the brasserie where we met on the Place de la Bastille. “To come upon something of such clear universal meaning is like finding the library at Alexandria.”

Brook couldn’t pinpoint exactly when he and Carriere began putting the work on its feet. It was, he said, a continual process of education, preparation, workshops and occasional trips to India.

“We have a permanent nucleus,” he explained, “so we began doing some things at once. We had a Kathakali professor who came and spent two months with us, years ago. We did a workshop just on the relationship between music and words . . . . It was not in watertight compartments.”

“The Mahabharata” played outdoors at Avignon and indoors at the Bouffes du Nord, Brook’s theater in Paris. In Los Angeles we’ll get the best of both. The show will be done on a sound stage at Hollywood’s Raleigh Studios, a space vast enough to simulate the outdoors and still provide the shelter and focus of an indoor experience.

“We thought of playing it in the open air,” Brook says, “and for several months we looked for sites,” but he scrapped the idea because of fire hazard (“The Mahabharata” uses many open flames), noise regulations and the unreliability of the September weather.

As for his French-into-English translation, “The biggest problem,” he acknowledges, “was the length.

“What was interesting was penetrating deeper into the inexhaustible differences between the two languages. I’ve worked with Jean-Claude for years, on translations in both directions,” he says, listing Carriere’s “The Conference of the Birds” and “The Ik” (which played UCLA in 1976 and remains “close to the heart” for Brook), Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens,” “Measure for Measure,” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“The great virtues of French are purity and simplicity and in a way transparency,” Brook adds. “Jean-Claude is a very pure writer. He made himself a list of words to use and words to avoid until his language could have no overtones that evoked the long associations: European, middle-aged, Christian associations.

“But a model of transparency in French becomes colorless in English. The texture of English (is meaty), which is what makes it good for theater and why the English actor plays more slowly and savors the individual word more than the flourish of a sentence. So to make it English, I had to make it muscular.”

About half of the original French-speaking company will also perform in the English-speaking version and many of the multinational actors had to learn the English over a period of about a year. It was hard work, in the spirit of “The Mahabharata.” To quote Brook: “Another epic task. But the people who are doing it again,” he says, “through doing it in a new language, have everything reopened for them. So, in a way, the difficulty is a great help.”

Brook’s auditions for recruits from outside the company were as unusual as the rest of the project.

“We look for indefinably precise things, if I can say that,” he says. “It’s openness, but openness linked to a specific talent. Many people in the theater are talented but closed, or interested only in their own image. There has to be a personal signature. Talent is a certain kind of (cultural) experience, which is why the international aspect (of the company) is so important. Each person has to bring, quite literally, his own ‘color.’ It’s a small group and there’s no place for two people who are roughly the same.”

With “The Mahabharata,” an added dimension came into play: “Certain cultures leave (their people) open to myth. Almost all third world members, coming from traditional (non-urban) backgrounds, have an affinity to myth. ‘The Mahabharata’ is something they understand immediately, because it is like tales that they’ve lived with all their lives. In our culture, children are brought up on a few fairy stories, but they haven’t been touched in their very deep roots. The living cultures of Africa and Asia and India are cultures where the division between the spiritual and the (mundane) isn’t made.”

In an audition setting (where Brook likes to not explain things but let intuition reign), he found that people bring their own backgrounds as baggage. A third world person, he says, would read a particularly metaphorical scene from “The Mahabharata” “with instant, natural understanding,” while “a very good English or French classical actor would say, ‘Now let me see . . . I don’t quite understand what he’s doing. Before reading this, I must know what sort of man this is . . . .’ ”

Brook smiles. “If you don’t feel it immediately, you never will.”

And it’s not restricted to actors. In the West, Brook feels, we have lost our mythological compass.

“In the middle of Australia,” he offers as an example, “there’s this great hump of rock which is a sacred place for the aborigines. I went to this rock, which has become a highly exploited tourist site, a fact bitterly resented by the aborigines. These are sacred spots, and to have people trample all over them is a cultural brutality. There was a small signpost saying: ‘This way to Aborigine fairy story land.’

“That (phrase) expresses everything, because in a sense it’s well meaning, but (totally) divorced from the idea that a spiritual reality can be a deeper reality. One has (a lot) to gain today by keeping a relationship with (ancient) tradition in a living forum--and that’s what the theater can do.”

Has anyone complained that this Western version of “The Mahabharata” is an oversimplification and therefore a betrayal of the original?

“Obviously one can’t set out to satisfy everyone,” Brook replies. “But there have been an enormous number of Indians, in particular, who felt the opposite. What most people appreciate, including most Indians, is that we resolutely said we’re not going to present this as a Hindu piece. It’s none of our business. We’re not qualified; we’re not Hindus. I have the greatest suspicion of people who come from the West and claim to teach Oriental traditions or religions.

“Another reason is that doctrine and essence in any religion are not the same. The universal language by which inner experiences in religion can be shared in the West is not doctrine, not the theoretical structure important only for people within that religion. Myth, on the other hand, works directly. It bypasses intellectual reaction and goes straight to another point through the story itself.

“In ‘The Mahabharata,’ time and again, the storyteller within the poem says, ‘If you listen to this carefully, in the end you will be someone else. You will be a different person.’ What this expresses is the fundamental reason to tell a great story through the theater.

“Take a simple example. There is this word in Indian which defies translation. Dharma . No one can translate dharma without making it an explanation: It’s like truth, like justice, like order. On the other hand, the events of ‘The Mahabharata’ in themselves express dharma . By experiencing those events, you are touching what dharma is about, even if, in the end, you can’t formulate it. You have tasted it as one tastes cheese.

“That’s why Jean-Claude resolutely said we are going to avoid everything remotely didactic, and try to make the language, the transparent French language, and the theatrical language, as open, as simple, as natural as possible. So that you aren’t going into a big philosophical teaching experience.

“You’re there to hear a story.”