The Mahabharata

we are a tiny part of a huge universal consciousness and everything is interconnected. Star Wars distilled that into the Force

Feature by Philippa Cochrane | 10 Jun 2007
What would you do if you wanted to bring one of the greatest epics of world literature to the stage? What if the last time someone tackled this particular story the result was a production still spoken about with reverence and awe twenty years later? A good place to start is to ensure
that you have a creative team at the very top of their collective games.

Director Stuart Wood has taken exactly this approach to his new staging of the Mahabharata. The script is written by Stephen Clark, who won the Olivier Award for his work on Martin Guerre. The original score has beenprovided by polymath Nitin Sawhney, renowned for his ability to move fluidly between a wide range of musical lexicons. The choreography is a contemporary take on the classical Indian style of Kathak, from one of the country's leading exponents of the form Gauri Sharma Tripathi. And, if this isn't enough to whet your appetite, Wood has thrown in puppetry from Sue Davies and video animation from Lorna Heavey. The result is described as spectacular theatre, and so it will have to be.

As Stuart Wood observes, "it is more than 20 years since Peter Brooks' seminal version of the Mahabharata. It's now time that this extraordinary story can be seen again in a new light." Which begs the question, what light? We live in times of escalating conflict in the Middle East, of the rise of religious fundamentalism across the globe and across the gamut of the major world faiths, and of a fracturing of any sense of humanity as a whole. If ever the key tenets of the Mahabharata need to be brought to a contemporary audience, it would appear that now is the time. Peter Brook's landmark 1985 interpretation was widely taken as a comment on the Cold War. Will this version of the story provide the same insights into the current world order?

The Mahabharata is one of the greatest texts ever written. Almost 3000 years old, running to almost 100,000 verses (more than ten times the length of the Bible) and telling the story of the most brutal war ever fought, it takes its place beside the other great epics of world culture and in many respects it is the daddy of them all. Its themes are as wide and as diverse as its cast of characters and yet its central message is resoundingly simple – everything is connected, we are all part of one vast consciousness and we have to carefully weigh the effect of our actions on the world we inhabit.

This version of the Mahabharata tells the story from the point of view of Draupadi, a woman who becomes wife to five brothers, the Pandavas, and is then lost in a card game by the head of the Pandavas, Yudhistira, along with the lands, the kingdom and all five of the brothers themselves. Saved from humiliation by Krishna, Draupadi vows to have revenge and shames her reluctant husbands into fighting. Thus an apocalyptic war is set into motion, initiating an apparently never ending cycle of hate and revenge. Even the culmination of the war in a righteous victory does not herald the beginning of a new golden peace.

If ever evidence of the story's enduring appeal were needed, it is in this scope beyond resolution. As in life, nothing in the Mahabharata is easy, nothing cut and dried.


Mahabharata, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Tue 5 June - Sat 9 June, 7.30pm, plus 2.30pm Sat 9 June http://www.eft.co.uk