London Critics Laud, Curse ‘Mahabharata’

Last year at this time we were girding our loins for the American premiere of Peter Brook’s “The Mahabharata” at the Los Angeles Festival. Now the London critics have had their chance to see it--not in London, but in Glasgow.

Its venue was a former transportation museum, which struck the Sunday Telegraph’s Francis King as being wickedly appropriate. Ten hours of “The Mahabharata” reminded King of “a journey across the Indian subcontinent in a third-class carriage of a non-corridor train.” A “memorable” experience, indeed--like getting hijacked.

Michael Coveney of the Financial Times was, on the other hand, genuinely transported. “No account that I have read had fully prepared me for the lightness and splendour of this dynastic power struggle,” he wrote. “Long it may be, stodgy it most certainly isn’t. This is a great amd unforgettable theatrical experience.”

Part of the seediness of the journey for King and some of the other critics was the “polyglot” nature of Brook’s acting company, with accents from all around the globe--some of them “virtually unintelligible.” Coveney and the other yea-sayers not only didn’t have a problem with this, but also thought it lent “a sense of the world enacting its own story.”

The Guardian’s Joyce MacMillan found Brook’s “Mahabharata” an example of “the richest and most exciting work that world theater has to offer,” but kept her head about it.

“It is a very human show and it has its failings,” she wrote. For instance, she could imagine adaptations of the original epic that might impose a more “ruthless” dramatic through-line on it. But in the end that, too, was a strength--a refusal to oversimplify the material “or to impose Western ideas of structure on it.”

Several critics wrote in an almost religious way about the production. (Victoria Radin in the New Statesman: “This performance has burned into my life.”) This aroused the satirist in King, who thought he saw some of the piece’s advocates snoozing--either that or heavily “sunk in contemplation of the Dharma.”

But even Peter Brook’s head was seen to nod a couple of times during the Los Angeles performances. The flesh is weak.

COME AND GONE. Five shows--5--closed on Broadway last weekend. They were: “Chess,” “A Walk in the Woods,” the Glenda Jackson-Christopher Plummer revival of “Macbeth” and two plays by August Wilson, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “Fences.” Only the last managed a decent run. We hear that it’s coming to the Doolittle Theatre in September--not the Wilshire, as previously reported. Yes, James Earl Jones will star.

IN QUOTES. Gordon Davidson, on the development of new scripts, quoted in the L.A. Theatre Center’s quarterly Alarums and Excursions--”As I get older, I’ve come to believe very strongly that you cannot necessarily make a play better.”