I. Prelude to Culture Wars
In an effort to capture some sense of the significance that the radical shifts in literary and cultural theory during the 1980s had for studies of avant-garde performance, one could do a lot worse than to frame the decade with the publication of Richard Schechner’s The End of Humanism in 1982 and the subsequent publication of Schechner’s The Future of Ritual in 1993. Indeed, the writing of these two books roughly coincided with the beginning and end of a decade that played out against the backdrop of the increasing influence of poststructuralism and that produced a sustained critique of Western cultural assumptions. Both books have a profound significance for how scholars conceptualize the avant-gardes. If the first book proclaimed the end of humanism, as Rebecca Schneider notes, before poststructuralism would make such claims “de rigeur,”1 The Future of Ritual is clearly committed to the models of performance studies that were shaped by the poststructuralist critique of Western humanism, by the related emergence of postcolonial studies, and by the often fierce debates about interculturalism that coincided with that emergence. With regard to the avant-gardes specifically, these two books also mark a significant shift from Schechner’s claim at the beginning of the decade that “the avant-garde,” having run its course, was now in “decline,” to his later assertion that avantgardism had devolved into one theatrical “style” among many. As I will be arguing in the sixth chapter of this book, it is more accurate to state that particular models for understanding the avant-gardes were in decline by the end of the ’80s. But more about that later. By the end of the decade, Schechner was certainly looking for new models. In The Future of Ritual he began testing them, tentatively asserting the idea of “five avant-gardes” and then suggesting that perhaps there were none.2 Most importantly, he rejected the idea of talking about “the avant-garde” in general, and famously suggested instead that it would be better to speak of “the historical,” “the current,” “the forward-looking,” “the tradition-seeking,” and “the intercultural” avant-gardes.
While one cannot help but applaud the pluralization of “avant-garde,” Schechner’s list of different avant-gardes are, for the most part, merely different possible trajectories within a conception of avantgardism still unified by his implied collective dismissal of the avant-garde as merely one style among many theatrical styles. In fact, Schechner does little more than differentiate avant-gardes according to temporal qualities. Whether an avant-garde is “historical,” “current,” “forward-looking,” or “tradition-seeking” is, I would suggest, more a question of nuance than it is a marker of the kind of categorical differences among avant-gardes that one might make in distinguishing, for example, the historical configurations of the military, the political, and the cultural avant-gardes—all of which have historical, current, forward-looking, and tradition-seeking factions within their ranks. The one anomaly in Schechner’s list is, of course, “the intercultural avant-garde,” and this avant-garde occupies a unique status in that Schechner gives it a definition that transcends style. “Intercultural performances occur across an enormous range of venues, styles, and purposes,” he observes. Following this observation, he then offers an intriguing, albeit somewhat idiosyncratic, explanation of what aligns intercultural performance with the avant-gardes: “What is avant-garde,” he argues, “is when the performance does not try to heal over rifts or fractures but further opens these for exploration.”3
To some extent, this explanation, which moves the notion of intercultural performance into realms of the avant-gardes, is a subtle but important coda to the rebuttal Schechner wrote to an extremely unflattering critique of his work that Rustom Bharucha published in 1984, the same year, coincidentally, that the English translation of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde appeared. In that critique, Bharucha took Schechner to task for advocating “cultural tourism” and for what he perceived to be Schechner’s callous appropriation of rituals from “other” cultures “simply to be used in an arbitrary way.”4 In his rebuttal, Schechner understandably rejected this accusation of arbitrariness as a gross oversimplification of his work (particularly as a practitioner), but that was not really the point. While Bharucha framed his criticism as a concern with what he called “the ethics of representation,” the potential broader dynamics of this concern fell prey to what was arguably Bharucha’s more pressing agenda in singling out Schechner in the first place: Bharucha’s assertion of a narrowly prescriptive view of ritual practice that cast the cultural exchanges between East and West as a struggle for the preservation of the sacred against the onslaught of the profane. It is hard to miss this subtext in Bharucha’s argument. Invoking a sense of religious privilege that was blurred with anti-colonialist discourse, Bharucha demanded that Schechner and others defer to his belief that rituals “are inextricably linked” to their “spiritual contexts”5—a belief that Bharucha reiterated in his later reply to Schechner’s published rebuttal. There Bharucha complained again that “Schechner does not address the question of faith when he defends the transportation of rituals from one culture to another.”6
For his part, Schechner responded not by yielding to Bharucha’s call for deference to the narrowly defined prerogatives of the faithful, but by reminding Bharucha that “cultural influence,” particularly in the late twentieth century, “is not a one-way street,”7 and by arguing, so to speak, that the Indian traffic on that street hardly resembled a caravan lining up uniformly behind Bharucha’s view of Indian ritual and theatrical practice. Indeed, Schechner cited a long list of Indian theater practitioners who, he argued, “probably have nothing in common except their passion for understanding and using in their own ways the rich, detailed, and multiple traditions of Indian performance.”8 Accusing Bharucha of being “profoundly patronizing,” Schechner noted again “this is not a one-way street,” and reminded Bharucha that “there is a flourishing ‘modern theatre’ (Euro-American influenced) in India.”9 Schechner returned to the image of the street once again at the end of his rebuttal: “And, as I have emphasized, it is a two-way street. To think only of ‘Western interpretations’ is to distort the process of history. The exchanges go far beyond India-America: they are worldwide, multicultural, and multivocal.”10 Three times in his short rebuttal, Schechner turned metaphorically to the street, and at an important level, these references to the street pointed Bharucha back to the original essay with which he had taken exception, Schechner’s “From Ritual to Theatre and Back.” In that essay Schechner’s theorizing is positioned at the crossroads of what he would later call the intercultural avant-garde—an avant-garde that experiments with cultural exchange rather than regulating mystified conceptions of cultural integrity. Schechner argues not only that “tourism is a two-way street,” but that, as a consequence, “it was logical” that the traffic of cross-cultural exchange “should be felt first in the avant-garde.”11 The question, of course, is what kind of avant-garde? A possible answer to this question can be found by returning to the streets.
Given that Schechner’s rebuttal addressed, among other things, Bharucha’s pointed criticism of The Performance Group’s production of Mother Courage, it is hard not to see in Schechner’s repeated references to the street not only an allusion to his own earlier writings but also a more subtle allusion to Brecht’s classic essay “The Street Scene.” In that essay, Brecht famously argued that the key principles of epic theatre could be found among the strategies of provisional demonstration used by someone recounting events he or she had witnessed on the street: “one essential element of the street scene,” Brecht argues, “lies in the natural attitude adopted by the demonstrator, which is two-fold; he is always taking two situations into account. He behaves naturally as a demonstrator, and he lets the subject of the demonstration behave naturally too. He never forgets nor does he allow it to be forgotten, that he is not the subject but the demonstrator.”12 If the allusion to the avant-garde traditions associated with Brecht’s notion of the street scene was too subtle to be registered in Schechner’s own repeated references to the street, those traditions were identifiable in the striking similarity between the passage cited above and the arguments that Schechner cited at the end of his rebuttal to Bharucha. There Schechner reiterated what he, in a “keynote address at the 1983 Calcutta conference” on “Indian Dance Tradition and Modern Theatre,” had already argued. Amid the unavoidable exchanges between cultures and traditions in the modern world, the fear of “cultural imperialism” was indeed legitimate, he argued, but there were important alternatives to exploitation. Speaking as a Westerner, Schechner espoused a notion of interculturalism that bore a strong affinity to Brechtian aesthetics. “In learning about the Other we also deepen our grasp of who we ourselves are: the Other is another and a mirror at the same time. We learn about our own aesthetics when we study the dance of another place and/or time.”13 Just as Brecht had argued that the demonstrator in the street scene “is always taking two situations into account,” so too did Schechner argue that intercultural performance practitioners are always positioned in a doubled situation, mirroring their own aesthetics when working with material from others.
Against the backdrop of the heated and at times deeply personalized debate between Bharucha and Schechner, it is easy to lose sight of how closely tied this Brechtian notion of intercultural performance is to Schechner’s later definition of the intercultural avant-garde in The Future of Ritual. When at the conclusion of his rebuttal to Bharucha, Schechner initially reiterated his claim that “the Other is another and a mirror at the same time,” Bharucha then suggested the claim was idealistic, pointing out that “the implications of interculturalism are very different for people in impoverished, ‘developing’ countries like India, and for people in technologically advanced, capitalist societies like America,”14 Although the exchanges between Schechner and Bharucha did not go through another round, Schechner was arguably attentive to the concerns that Bharucha expressed about interculturalism. His subsequent assertion in The Future of Ritual that intercultural performance becomes avant-garde when it “does not try to heal over rifts or fractures but further opens these for exploration” is, in this respect, an important amendment to his Brechtian-influenced notion that “the Other is another and a mirror at the same time.” Indeed, a mirror does not hide but rather shows the rifts and fractures in all their detail. In doing so, it invites further exploration in a typically Brechtian fashion—the kind of exploration that engages history and the ethics of representation in profoundly dynamic and critically self-reflective ways. It is this kind of exploration, to follow Schechner, that is central to the notion of an intercultural avant-garde.
As dynamic as this notion of the intercultural avant-garde may be, it is worth pausing to consider one of the major problems that it leaves intact. In simplest terms that problem centers on issues of presumed authority and intentionality: the presumed authority and intentionality of avant-garde performance. While struggles for cultural authority over particular texts and rituals, or struggles over the appropriation of them from one culture by another, are certainly a part of the larger context of this problem and of how I want to discuss it in the remainder of this chapter, I also want to suggest a more pointed consideration in that discussion—one that distinguishes the notion of an avant-garde from avant-garde performances as such: a consideration, in short, that distinguishes a practitioner’s intent from the assessment of a performance itself. The issue here is thus not so much the assertion of an assumed cultural authority over particular texts or particular rituals in a way that would question the political or ethical legitimacy of an experimental adaptation of them—the kind of assertion, for example, that is at the core of Bharucha’s critique of Schechner’s work. The issue is rather the relation of individual avant-garde artists to individual works of avant-garde performance: the relation, for example, of Schechner as a director to a work like Dionysus in 69. The issue that I want to address concerns what I would suggest is a peculiar double standard in the theories of avant-garde performance.
That double standard has everything to do with how readily critics accept the legitimacy of an avant-garde’s questioning of textual authority and authorial intent and thereby grant a broad experimental license to avant-garde practitioners. In the previous chapter on Frankenstein, I examined how gendered the dynamics of that acceptance tend to be. Here I want to push in a different direction and question how, despite granting broad interpretive license to avant-garde artists, critics tend to tacitly accept something akin to authorial intent when considering the relation of an avant-garde artist/practitioner to the performance pieces that he or she produces. But if critics accept a fundamental distinction between an author and a text, to what extent, it behooves us then to ask, should critics and historians assume a fundamental correspondence between what a practitioner does and what a work does? Since this question arises, in part, out of a consideration of the exchanges between Bharucha and Schechner, it can be refined even further to focus specifically on the extent to which critics and historians should assume a correspondence between what an experimental director does and what his or her work does. Although this bit of fine-tuning could certainly lead to a further consideration of Schechner’s work as an international director, there are perhaps more important opportunities for the kind of consideration that I am suggesting. Peter Brook’s production of The Mahabharata especially comes to mind. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that the exchanges between Bharucha and Schechner in the mid 1980s were merely a rehearsal for the larger battle that would be waged at the end of the decade around Brook’s controversial production—a battle fully immersed in the double standards that I want to challenge in this chapter.
II. (Re)Citing Battle Lines
Certain to be counted among the many flashpoints in the cultural wars of the late 1980s, Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata occupies a unique and ultimately illuminating position in the history of avant-garde theater and performance criticism. Stained by the lingering residues of its producer’s gross and well-documented cultural insensitivities, Brook’s The Mahabharata became a kind of pariah shortly after its premier.15 That stain marks the history of the piece’s reception and has resulted either in a consistent blurring of the production with its producer or in an implicit call to boycott its performance as a way to hold Brook accountable for his indefensible behavior while he was in India, researching the production. In either case, scholars have been unable or unwilling to move beyond considerations that are based on an equation of Brook’s production with Peter Brook the person. While from a political standpoint such equations initially may be understandable, from a theoretical perspective they not only have been problematic from the very start, but they also have inadvertently elided profoundly significant political ramifications in Brook’s The Mahabharata, ramifications that only become visible if critics make a clear break between Brook and his production. Though I have suggested the need for such a break in the opening section of this chapter, ultimately the justifications for the break are to be found in the arguments of critical theory and poststructuralism. Deconstructive in their larger implications, those arguments are by no means an apology for Brook’s personal politics or a reaffirmation of the expressed intentions of his adaptation. Nor are they an attempt to separate aesthetics and politics or, more specifically, an attempt to build an opposition between critical theory and cultural politics. On the contrary, a consideration of Brook’s The Mahabharata within the context of critical theory and postructuralism illuminates political undercurrents in Brook’s adaptation that not only run directly counter to his own intent as a producer, but also run directly counter to the political and philosophical underpinnings of his critics.
To claim that Brook’s production has political implications running counter to his expressed intent may initially seem to reaffirm the views of those critics who argue that Brook’s liberal humanistic agenda ultimately results in regressive and hegemonic cultural politics. While at one level, the following arguments do in fact reaffirm such criticisms of Peter Brook the person, at a more fundamental level they are concerned with the manner in which the dynamics of Brook’s The Mahabharata—irrespective of, indeed contrary to, the problematic humanistic underpinnings of Brook’s stated objectives—pivot upon an identifiable Brechtian political aesthetic. As I will show, the political dimensions of that aesthetic are manifested in the piece’s self-reflexive scrutiny of the processes of representation, in its profound questioning of notions of textual and cultural authority, and in its implicit, radical critique of identity politics. At the same time, the presence of this Brechtian aesthetic in The Mahabharata, inasmuch as it runs counter to Brook’s directorial intent, raises fundamental questions about the intersection between Brechtian technique and poststructuralism. Indeed, my basic underlying assertion is that Brook’s The Mahabharata ultimately illustrates how little critics have recognized that the intersection of Brechtian aesthetics with poststructuralism severs Brechtian technique and its concomitant political effects from a necessary dependence upon the conscious political intents of a playwright or director. Within a theory of avant-garde performance, this severance suggests the need, more generally, to challenge the moments in criticism where the lines that would otherwise distinguish an artist and his or her work begin to blur.
Although not likely the product of conscious design, the overlooked political dimensions of Brook’s The Mahabharata are closely tied to the work of those who, at a time when other critics were taking Brook to task, were seeking to unite the arguments of poststructuralism and deconstruction with the legacies of Brechtian theatre.16 Such efforts were not the only trends to develop as critical theory began to alter the course of theater studies in the mid and late 1980s, and that is part of the reason why scholars have not brought the combination of critical theory and Brechtian aesthetics to bear on analyses of Brook’s piece. Such an explanation is at least implied by Una Chaudhuri’s “Working Out (of) Place” which plots the increasingly hostile response to Brook’s The Mahabharata along an arc parallel to the growing influence of Edward Said’s pivotal study Orientalism. Chaudhuri presents a convincing case that Brook’s piece fell prey to the changing political landscape “when intercultural performance shifted its grounds in Western liberal humanism and began to be recontextualied within the burgeoning critical discourse [ . . . ] of postcolonialism.”17
In addition to this historical context, Chaudhuri takes two important steps beyond the impasse that has dominated the critical discussion of Brook’s piece. First, she explicitly calls for an assessment of Brook’s The Mahabharata that does not pivot on a “personal denigration” of Brook himself.18 Second, in discussing the problems that Brook’s international cast had with the English language, Chaudhuri suggests, in passing, a Brechtian quality to Brook’s production that she unfortunately does not fully explore. Rather, she characterizes the actors’ strained use of English as “a kind of Brechtian effect in a non-Brechtian context.”19 One can only speculate as to why Chaudhuri does not pursue this idea further, but even this passing reference to the Brechtian effect of Brook’s production opens an important avenue for a reevaluation of The Mahabharata. Ultimately, that critical avenue not only leads well beyond a “personal denigration” of Brook the person, but it also takes critical discussion beyond a fixation on directorial intent and lays open a Brechtian undercurrent of Brook’s adaptation.
If the poststructuralist reassessment of Brechtian theatre has taught us anything, it is a reaffirmation of the basic principle that Brechtian contexts do not generate Brechtian effects so much as Brechtian effects create Brechtian contexts. The crucial question looming at the end of Chaudhuri’s article is whether the effect she so aptly identifies is merely a by-product of a unique but interesting coincidence or rather an example of a larger pattern of theatrical effects which, when combined, cast a decisively Brechtian hue across Brook’s controversial adaptation of India’s national epic. The stakes in this question go well beyond a simple quantitative enumeration of theatrical effects that one may (or may not) characterize as Brechtian. It is not the tally of effects that counts but the context that those effects create, regardless of whether that context coincides with directorial intent.
My goal here is not so much to attribute a Brechtian intent to Brook as a director as it is to identify the Brechtian elements in his production and to consider the myriad ways that those elements not only subvert Brook’s expressed intent as a director, but subvert the underlying assumptions of his critics as well. The Brechtian context created by these techniques—specifically by the techniques of estrangement and interruption—radically inverts what critics have presumed to be the piece’s implicit regressive politics, and it does so primarily because the regressive politics associated with Brook’s production have more to do with Brook’s expressed intent than with the dynamics of the production itself. Indeed, the Brechtian dimensions of Brook’s adaptation transform what has been perceived to be an instance of cultural appropriation into a process that insistently reveals, rather than reproduces, the conditions of appropriation, a process that repeatedly “remind[s] us that representations are not given but produced,”20 and that offers a politically significant “critique of representation as such.”21
The problem is that such Brechtian reminders tend to run counter to the most prominent statements Brook has made regarding The Mahabharata, statements that, in their consistency with the “evolving spiritual quest at the center of . . . [Brook’s] research and performance” in the 1980s, tend to suggest a humanistic agenda or intent seldom associated with Brechtian fare and also at the center of poststructuralism’s most radical critiques.22 It is difficult to square a Brechtian critique of representation as such with Brook’s comment that in The Mahabharata he intended to “suggest the flavor of India,” while celebrating a work that “carries echoes for all mankind”23 (a comment, it is worth noting in passing, similar to Schechner’s statement to Bharucha that when looking at a wide variety of cultural performances, “the flavor of each is what interests me”24). Such sentiments have justifiably incurred the ire of critics because at the very least they accommodate, if not directly support, the kind of rationalized humanistic gloss that historically has provided cover for the most crass instances of cultural hegemony.25 Inasmuch as such statements express Brook’s intentions, they well merit the bitter criticism they have received.
Nonetheless, to the extent that Brook’s piece has served (on a small scale) as a point against which to articulate a critical postcolonial discourse, that point of departure is based upon the assumption of a one-to-one relation between Brook’s expressed liberal humanistic philosophies and the aesthetic principles governing his production of The Mahabharata. The assumption is that those humanistic philosophies shape an intent that in turn is identifiably manifested in Brook’s production.26 Yet it is precisely with regard to Brook’s statements of intent—indeed with regard to intentionality in general—that the coordination of critical theory and Brechtian aesthetics is particularly important. Critical theory not only provides a line of inquiry that moves beyond the ad hominem attacks on Peter Brook’s personal politics (however justifiable those attacks may be), but, more importantly, it also highlights the need to separate the discussion of intent from actual effect. This is as true of Peter Brook’s expressed intent as it is of the intent that critics like Gautam Dasgupta presume to be an inherent part of India’s national epic when they criticize Brook’s adaptation with arguments like “One should not, under cover of universality of theme or character, undercut the intrinsic core of how The Mahabharata characters function within the world of which they are a part.”27 From the perspective of poststructuralism, it is as problematic to speak casually of “echoes for all mankind” as it is to speak of the “intrinsic core” of any text. With regard to the Brechtian context of Brook’s The Mahabharata, then, the issue is not so much about what Brook intends or the presumed intent of the original Mahabharata. Rather, the issue is what theatrical techniques and effects Brook’s production actually employs and what context those techniques and effects create.
Chaudhuri has already mentioned one of those techniques, namely the Brechtian quality of the strained use of English in productions outside of France.28 This use of English was the direct result of Brook’s decision to use an international cast with diverse cultural and racial backgrounds. That decision generated an even more obvious example of Brechtian aesthetics than the one mentioned by Chaudhuri. The international cast led to numerous instances of cross-casting; Brook even described his doubling of Maurice Bénichou in the roles of Ganesha and Krishna as a deliberate “distancing effect.”29 In the late 1980s, Brook was certainly not alone in using these techniques. Interestingly enough, when Caryl Churchill employed them in Cloud Nine around the same time, critics praised her use of doubling and cross-casting as “graphic example[s] of the Brechtian spectatorial triangle” that presents “the character-as-socially-constructed to the spectator in a very literal way.”30 Although these techniques have never really been acknowledged in any significant way in the reception of Brook’s The Mahabharata, one would be hard-pressed to argue that Brook’s use of cross-linguistic and cross-racial casting does not function in a manner similar to Churchill’s use of it, regardless of intent. Indeed, the cross-linguistic, cross-racial, and cross-cultural castings of Brook’s production all comply with what Walter Benjamin has famously called “the first commandment of epic theatre”: that “‘the one who shows’—that is, the actor—‘shall be shown’”31—a commandment that has clear affinities with Brecht’s notion of the street scene.
Without specifically naming it, Brook’s actors were well aware of the underlying role that this so-called Brechtian commandment played in Brook’s production. Vittorio Mezzogiorno, the Italian actor who played Arjuna, specifically noted that Brook was concerned with the monumental cultural differences separating his actors from their Indian characters and that Brook did not want them to adopt a Stanislavskian approach through which they would “fully inhabit [. . .] an imaginary character.”32 As Mezzogiorno notes in an interview with Martine Millon, Brook did not want to impose on an actor “a culture to which he doesn’t belong.” On the contrary, the goal was for the actor to incorporate “the Indian world solely by impressions from the perspective of his own culture, his own temperament, his own sensations.”33 For many the reliance on such unreliable impressions was indicative of the production’s failure as a whole.34 But combined with the linguistic idiosyncracies and instances of cross-casting, the production’s reliance on impressions of India garnered from the perspectives of actors coming from various cultural backgrounds not only multiplied the “disparate elements”35 in the performance, but also tended to underscore a classic mechanism of Brechtian theater, what Brecht called the “not . . . but.” This mechanism, as Brecht explained, required actors to perform in such a manner that what they were actually doing would “at all essential points discover, specify, imply what [they were] not doing.”36 In Brook’s The Mahabharata, this use of the “not . . . but” repeatedly and at multiple levels underscores for the audience the Western social construction of images of Indian culture, people, and literature. Within the Brechtian context of the production, Brook’s infamous reference to “a flavor of India” thus ironically inclined toward an acknowledgment that an accurate representation of India or of The Mahabharata was not so much to be expected of the production, as was a critical aesthetic scrutiny of the processes of representation themselves. To echo Schechner’s comments once again: “the Other is another and a mirror at the same time.” As if in anticipation of Rustom Bharucha’s criticism that “one cannot separate the culture from the text”37 (i.e., cannot separate India from The Mahabharata), the subtle presence of the Brechtian “not . . . but” in Brook’s adaptation implies that culture is not so much located in texts as it is in readers; it implies that one cannot separate one’s own culture from the reading of a text.38
On a larger scale, such Brechtian undercurrents have had the critical function of a sword with two edges, not only cutting against the grain of Brook’s liberal humanistic philosophies, but also against the grain of the assertions of critics like Dasgupta, who argues, for example, that “there is no dramatic or epic kernel to The Mahabharata outside of its theological value system” and that The Mahabharata “is nothing, [and is] an empty shell” if it does not address the “deeply-ingrained structure of ritual beliefs and ethical codes of conduct intrinsic to its [Indian] audience.”39 Obviously, these criticisms intend to underscore the cultural blindness of Brook’s humanistic worldview, despite Brook’s assertion that a close regard for the Indian traditions of The Mahabharata “was never a goal.”40 Inasmuch as Dasgupta’s concerns are positioned as a critique of that humanistic worldview, they coincide with “key operations of deconstruction and post-structuralism” that inform postcolonial theory, and that, as Janelle Reinelt has noted, Brecht incidentally anticipated.41 Yet while Dasgupta’s critique of Brook may find common ground with a poststructuralist (and Brechtain) critique of humanistic philosophies, a fundamental divide finally separates the two. In his critique of Brook, Dasgupta criticizes one set of absolutes by imposing the authority of another, in this particular instance by imposing a religious authority that echoes Bharucha’s references to the “cosmic context” of The Mahabharata and to the “ritual status” of its characters.42
Since these appeals to religious authority situate the arguments of Dasgupta and Bharucha within a closed metaphysical system, deference may be the best and only response to their concerns. These concerns are ultimately couched in a matter of faith, and so finally exclude themselves from debate. (This was the very problem with Bharucha’s critique of Schechner.) Nevertheless, Dasgupta and Bharucha, in weighing Brook’s production against its loyalty to the theological and ritual structures of The Mahabharata, have measured the work against a standard that is incommensurable with the theater that Brook’s production of The Mahabharata exemplifies, especially with regard to its Brechtian underpinnings. Nowhere is the nature of this theater more evident than in Brecht’s own comments on the relation of theater to ritual practice. To understand the former, Brecht argues, it is absolutely necessary to distinguish it from the latter:
Theatre may be said to be derived from ritual, but that is only to say that it becomes theatre once the two have separated; what it brought over from the mysteries was not its former ritual function, but purely and simply the pleasure which accompanied this.43
Brecht’s distinction between the mysteries associated with ritual and the pleasures associated with theater has profound implications for our understanding of Brook’s production of The Mahabharata. Not only do Brecht’s comments anticipate poststructualism’s rejection of logocentrism in favor of what Derrida has called a “non-theological space,” but they also herald the emergence of that theatrical space as a locus of jouissance and pleasure.44 The pleasure of the theater to which Brecht refers ultimately embraces a notion of “performance whose only authority is in the performance itself,”45 rather than a notion of performance whose authority resides in “sacred texts.”46 As a precursor to subsequent poststructuralist theories, Brecht’s notion of pleasure also locates meaning in slippage and in the play of theatrical signifiers rather than in a logocentric reading of The Mahabharata that would be legitimized by a strict adherence to the authority of an absent and presumably authentic ritual practice, however diverse or pluralistic that practice may be.
Inasmuch as Brechtian pleasure is located in the realms of performance, it has a dual relevance for Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata. First there is the issue of The Mahabharata’s rich ritual traditions. With or without their underlying metaphysical presuppositions, those traditions contribute importantly to “an image of a social order”47 within which an Indian cultural identity may repeatedly be imagined and re-imagined, while nonetheless remaining secure and while retaining a specific social framework that provides it with a guarded meaning and significance. But even at the level of social and cultural identity, Brecht’s distinction between the mysteries of ritual and the pleasures of the theater tends to delineate between the ritual traditions of The Mahabharata and Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata for the theater. If, as Bruce McConachie argues, the function of ritual, once its metaphysical underpinnings are bracketed, is to legitimize and secure a meaningful cultural identity, then the Brechtian distinction between ritual and theater suggests that a very different agenda is at play in Brook’s adaptation. That this agenda is positioned—in a quintessentially Brechtian fashion—as at odds with the notions of identification and identity will become clear momentarily. But as a point of transition, it is worth noting that Brecht’s distinction between the mysteries of ritual and the pleasures of theater lays the foundation for a conception of interculturalism that is not grounded in the humanistic philosophical absolutes that shadow Brook’s own commentary on his adaptation of The Mahabharata.
Some sense of that conception is evident in W. B. Worthen’s subtle challenge to the specter of (in)authenticity that haunted the enactment of Ndembu rituals in Victor Turner’s anthropology classes. Questioning Turner’s own depiction of those classroom enactments as “highly artificial” and “inauthentic,” Worthen suggests that Turner’s performances be viewed not as reenactments or representations but as intercultural performances with a dynamic all their own. Challenging Turner’s reading of his re-enactments of ritual practices in his own classroom, Worthen argues:
At the moment that this performance becomes truly intercultural and intertextual—when, we might say, the rituals of NYU and the Ndembu finally deconstruct one another, subvert notions of authorized performance altogether—it loses its value for Turner, precisely because that “authentic” other disappears from view, is replaced by a performance whose only authority is the performance itself.48
Just as Brecht locates the advent of theatre in a departure from the logocentric mysteries of ritual, Worthen locates intercultural performance in a departure from the belief in an absent, legitimizing authenticity. For Worthen, intercultural performance is thus not a site “of interpretation” or “of echoing meanings which already exist elsewhere” but rather, in an obvious echo of Brechtian theory, a site “where the ways in which meaning is produced can be interrogated, inspected, performed.”49
There is also the issue of the infidelity of Brook’s production to the presumed authority of The Mahabharata as a text whose status critics have not only depicted as sacred but also as a crucial element in Indian cultural identity.50 Here, the Brechtain notion of pleasure coincides with a subtle but important distinction between representation and the Brechtian technique of quotation: that is, between an adaptation measured against a repressive lack of accuracy that its representations cultivate, and an adaptation measured against the thought-provoking interruptions its quotations achieve. While the former measurement serves as a reassertion of a repressed cultural identity and as a focal point for a legitimate, although problematic, struggle for control of the discursive foundations of identity politics, the latter (a Brechtian strategy) aims at obstructing identification in order to achieve a calculated moment of critical and political reflection. If viewed exclusively as an attempted representation, Brook’s adaptation is clearly open to charges—like those articulated by Dasgupta—that it exemplifies a contemporary specter of “Orientalism” and thus follows the precedent that was set by scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that granted the West the prerogative of representing the East according to the West’s own ideological presumptions. From this perspective, Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata is but another example of the Orient not being “allowed to represent itself.”51 Yet viewed as an instance of Brechtian quotation, Brook’s adaptation takes on a much more complicated and complicating dynamic. For “Orientalism” pivots on the assumption that when the West represents the East, the former represses the latter by attempting to pass the representation off as authentic and accurate. Yet the Brechtian quote does nothing of the sort. Inasmuch as Brook’s adaptation quotes The Mahabharata, it constantly calls attention to the mechanisms of its representations, repeatedly interrupting and subtly undermining their credibility with the audience. From this perspective, Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata interrupts to expose rather than merely to reproduce the mechanisms of contemporary “Orientalism.”
Such interruptions are central to Brechtian quotation, but for quotation to serve as an effective strategy of displacement, alienation, and ultimately critical and political reflection, it must simultaneously also interrupt the context of the material it cites. As Benjamin suggests, “quoting a text implies interrupting its context.”52 In Brook’s The Mahabharata, this latter aspect of Brechtian quotation pushes us well beyond the “Western humanist” commitment to multiculturalism that critics like Chaudhuri have argued motivates Brook’s “massive displacement” of The Mahabharata’s “very insistent [Indian] context.”53 On the contrary, Brechtian quotation adds a profoundly deconstructive undercurrent to those displacements.54 For it tags the underlying assumptions of Brook’s harshest critics with a contradictory shadow. Against the backdrop of categorical charges that Brook betrays The Mahabharata’s “deepest meanings”55 and of bitter criticism that his adaptation falters because it displaces and fails to confront “the meaning (or meanings) of The Mahabharata . . . within their own cultural context,”56 a reading of those same cultural displacements as examples of Brechtian quotation ultimately questions and demands a rethinking of the identity politics upon which these criticisms of Brook’s work are based. As instances of Brechtain quotation, Brook’s displacements of The Mahabharata’s cultural context thus exemplify a fundamental technique of estrangement that not only permeates the whole of Brook’s adaptation but that consistently interrupts the processes of identification (for both Eastern and Western audiences), and so leads us out of what Chaudhuri has called “the essentialist trap of identity politics,” that is, out of a policing of “ethnic representations . . . [to] keep them contained within the narrow confines of a prescriptive group identity.”57
Although there is a great potential for slippage between the concept of identification that Brechtian quotation interrupts and the concept of identity that functions as the modifier of “identity politics,” recent assessments of the Brechtian method suggest an important area of overlap between the two concepts, which radically alters the polarized dynamic that has characterized Brook’s production and its reception. As is widely known to those familiar with Brechtian theory, the interruptions generated by quotation result when an actor narrates his or her role rather than attempting—through, say, a Stanislavskian method—to lay the foundation for empathy and for an identification between actor and character or actor(s) and audience.58 In his book Brecht and Method, Fredric Jameson takes issue with the accepted view that the Brechtian technique of quotation is positioned as a mere refusal of the identifications upon which the dominant theater of Brecht’s day relied. Moving in a critical direction that highlights the conceptual overlap in the “identification” interrupted by Brecht and the “identity” contained in identity politics, Jameson suggests that the stakes in Brecht’s quotations pivot on a much more fundamental recognition that the “notion of ‘identification’ is one of the most problematic and unexamined concepts in the arsenal of sociological cliché,” and he implicitly argues that Brecht’s resistance to “identification” is in fact a radical precursor of the decentered notions of the self that later surface in poststructuralist theory:
Brecht’s positions are better read not as a refusal of identification but, rather, as the consequences to be drawn from the fact that such a thing never existed in the first place. . . . [T]he quoting of a character’s expressions of feeling and emotion . . . is the result of a radical absence of the self, or at least the coming to terms with a realization that what we call our “self” is itself an object for consciousness, not our consciousness itself: it is a foreign body within an impersonal consciousness, which we try to manipulate.59
If the interruptions by Brechtian quotation ultimately imply, as Jameson contends, that the self is a manipulable object of consciousness rather than consciousness itself, then identity and identification begin to lose their mystified, logocentric, and unified aura of authority, and the issue that emerges from the radical displacements of cultural context in Brook’s The Mahabharata is not whether the adaptation misses the “deepest meanings” of the Indian epic or whether it fails to confront those meanings within “their own cultural context.” The issue is about the very notion of “deeper meanings” as such.
In the reception of Brook’s adaptation, that construction, bound as it is to notions of authenticity and authority (both with regard to textuality and identity), falls well within the parameters of a high modernist aesthetic, the vigilant maintenance of which ironically pits Brook’s critics and Brook himself in a struggle over ideological territory that the Brechtian undercurrents of Brook’s adaptation interrupt and deconstruct. While the distancing techniques of cross-linguistic and cross-racial casting reinforce these interruptions, the interruptions are primarily the result of an undercurrent strategy of quotation that makes strange and, more importantly, disrupts identification with the actual narrative of The Mahabharata. In Brook’s adaptation, this strategy of disruptive quotation is probably best exemplified in the massive displacement and interruption that occurs when Krishna, resorting to the third person at the beginning of the great final battle, circumvents the metaphysical dialogues of the Bhagavad Gita and simply tells everyone instead that “he spoke for a very long time.”60 Similar but less significant interruptions occur when Krishna, without further clarification, advises Arjuna to “act, but do not reflect on the fruits of the action,”61 and when “Yudhisthira is prevented from entering Heaven” because his companion is a dog—even though it is never made clear that in the Hindu tradition the dog is a sign of pollution.62 Interrupted from the context of their “Hindu ritual universe,” these estranged quotations of The Mahabharata provoked puzzled laughter from Western audiences and impassioned denouncements from Indian critics.63 In short, they effectively alienated both Western and Eastern audiences and thwarted their ability to identify with the events unfolding before them.64 Furthermore, the theatrical context created in place of the cultural context, with its interrupting quotations, radically scrutinized the construction, representation, and manipulation of identity as a social and political concept.
The consequences of this scrutiny work as much against Brook’s humanistic commitment to multiculturalism as they do against the identity politics pursued by his critics, exposing the fundamentally conservative, indeed restrictive, foundations not only of Brook’s humanistic universals but also of assertions of identity as such. For the liberal humanistic philosophies motivating Brook’s adaptation—philosophies that are also tied to the aesthetics of high modernism—depend upon the presumption of fundamental moments of identification across the centuries and across cultural boundaries: “echoes for all mankind” is, in fact, nothing short of a codified assertion of a unified, immutable notion of the self with which everyone, regardless of time, place, or culture, presumably can identify.65 The undercurrent of Brechtian interruptions of Brook’s production recontextualizes these “echoes,” shedding their guise as an affirmation of an immutable notion of the self and exposing their potential as a manipulable tool of hegemonic rhetoric. At the same time, however, these same Brechtian undercurrents, inasmuch as they interrupt the Indian and Hindu cultural contexts of The Mahabharata, also erode the authority of the identity that Brook’s critics have constructed as a critical response to his adaptation.
Both the seams of that constructed identity and its grounding in the aesthetic presumptions of high modernism are evident in the almost entirely dismissive attitude these critics display toward the popular cultural manifestations of The Mahabharata in Indian society, in addition to its elevated status as a sacred text and as a source of ritual structure. For all the discussion of the gaps, exclusions, and cultural displacements of Brook’s adaptation, and for all the complaints about his irresponsible handling of the diverse meanings and manifold ritual practices associated with The Mahabharata, there is, among Brook’s critics, virtually no acknowledgment extended to The Mahabharata’s kitsch-ridden currency in low cultural expressions like comic books and Indian television serials. The closest we come to such an acknowledgment is Bharucha’s expressed displeasure with “Ramanand Sagar’s serialization of the Ramayana” and his (Bharucha’s) puzzling assertion that because Indians have internalized The Mahabharata, their experience of “a television serial of the Ramayana,” however “synthetic, tacky, [and] sticky in the worst tradition of Hindi films” it may be, leads them to transform “this representation into a deeply spiritual experience.”66 At one level, the reinscription of an authentic spirituality across a “synthetic” and “tacky” secular experience of The Mahabharata is absolutely necessary if Bharucha is to maintain the integrity and authority of an Indian cultural identity violated by Brook’s adaptation. The alternative is to acknowledge that even The Mahabharata, prior to Brook’s “mishandling” of it, plays both sides of Brecht’s distinction between ritual grounded in mystery and theater grounded in pleasure, slippage, and jouissance. Ironically, the very authority to take Brook to task for what he excluded in his adaptation necessitates the exclusion of cultural forms and experiences of The Mahabharata that would, if not legitimize, then at the very least be indifferent to Brook’s free-handed adaptation.
Where the undercurrent of Brechtian quotations in the adaptation leads then is toward a fundamental shift in critical perspectives. They move in a direction where the stakes hinge not on a conception of representation as a product (or end-in-itself) that can be assessed according to its authenticity or authority but rather where performance builds upon repeated moments of illuminated self-referentiality and where a critical examination of representation as such begins with an exposure of one’s own social and cultural positionality. While one might complain that we do not get India in Brook’s Mahabharata, the Brechtian dimension of this adaptation would suggest a different point of critical focus, one that ultimately moves beyond the actual boundaries of theater. What Brook’s adaptation thus provides, however inadvertently, is a profoundly rich reflection on precisely how difficult it is to represent India in the larger mediums of Western culture. One passing example of the far-reaching extent of that difficulty can be found right at the center of the chorus of voices expressing dismay and contempt for the insensitive way that Brook handled his project. I refer here to a piece called “The Aftermath: When Peter Brook Came to India,” which contains the edited transcripts of an interview that Phillip Zarrilli and Deborah Neff conducted with the director Probir Guha (the director for The Living Theatre in Calcutta) in August of 1985, shortly after Brook’s production premiered. The interview amounted to the first in a series of scathing critiques of the disparity between the claims to universal humanism apparently underlying Brook’s The Mahabharata and the now infamous disregard that Brook showed toward his Indian hosts while in India researching his project. Following Zarrilli’s lead, later accounts of Brook’s trips to India, like the searing criticisms articulated by Bharucha and Hiltebeitel, repeatedly underscore the extent to which Brook’s insensitivity was despicable not so much because of the condescending way he dealt with Indians who were trying in good faith to assist him but because his insensitivity toward them had damaging effects on their relations with their friends, professional colleagues, and respective communities.67 But even Zarrilli, who in 1985 was going against the grain in exposing Brook, quickly found himself confronting similar accusations of insensitivity and usurpation in the way that he went about facilitating the exposure.
Shortly after publishing Zarrilli’s interview, TDR followed up with a piece called “More Aftermath,” in which the Indian dancer Avanthi Meduri bitterly accused Zarrilli of a hypocritical sleight of hand and of having manipulated Guha with questions so leading that they made Zarrilli his spokesman. Meduri argued that Zarrilli had thereby usurped Guha’s voice and thus had created another instance of victimization.68 It was a telling and in many respects underestimated moment, which precipitated a pointed but defensive response from Zarrilli (not unlike Richard Schechner’s earlier response to Bharucha’s critique of his work). Its significance in the overall reception of Brook’s The Mahabharata lies, first of all, in the way that Meduri’s critique of Zarrilli illustrates how easily, if not unavoidably, critics from the West can be caught unawares by the cultural presumptions of their own discourse. Second, and more important, Meduri’s critique underscores how utterly crucial an openly acknowledged self-conscious awareness of one’s own social and cultural positionality is as a prerequisite to expressions on behalf of another culture.
This need for an expressed acknowledgment of one’s social and cultural positionality is especially true when a particular representation might be haunted by the specters of a colonial legacy. In relation to epic theatre, John Rouse has noted:
Through the self-referentiality of its elegant design and comically exaggerated acting, Brecht’s theatrical interpretation draws attention to its own situation of enunciation, subverting the ideological presentation of interpretation as the simple reflection of reality.69
While the legacies of colonialism may very well haunt Brook’s own work, the identifiable Brechtian undercurrents of the adaptation give conscious voice to a form of intercultural representation that utilizes numerous techniques of alienation to highlight the piece’s own cultural positionality and to draw “attention to its own situation of enunciation.”
Given his-oft cited references to humanistic interpretations of literature, the extent of Brook’s conscious involvement with Brecht is certainly open to debate. But it is worth noting that twice in his discussions of the particulars of his production, Brook mentions the use of “distancing effect[s]” and “Brechtian techniques.”70 The latter of these two references occurs specifically within the context of a discussion of the character Vyasa, who, following Indian tradition, occupies the position of author and narrator in the adaptation. As a figurative construct, however, Vyasa is also the single most important element for understanding the confluence of Brechtian technique and critical theory underlying Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata.71 First of all, the use of a narrator is a mainstay of Brechtian strategies of interruption and alienation, and it thus adds to the Brechtian context of the production as a whole. So while Brook’s use of Vyasa coincides with Indian traditions, it simultaneously interrupts those traditions and undermines their authority. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Vyasa’s own self-conscious role as an author—in particular, his admission that there are elements in his poem that are lively, uncontrollable, and beyond his intent—not only coincides with some of the most basic precepts that critical theory has contributed to our understanding of what an author is, but Vyasa’s admitted lack of authorial control ultimately also lays the foundation for understanding the contradictory relation that Brook’s liberal humanistic philosophies have to the insistent Brechtian undercurrents of his production.
That foundation, as will become clear in a moment, rests on a parallel between the limited authority that Vyasa as an author has over his material and the limited authority that Brook as a director has over his production. Since the rich history of The Mahabharata encompasses diverse textual and performance traditions, it is perhaps appropriate that these parallel limitations are framed within a larger, reciprocally illuminating dynamic between text and performance. To some extent, Vyasa thematizes that very dynamic even as he concedes the limitations of his own intent as an author. Vyasa’s concession is clearest in the moments directly following his most decisive intervention in his own narrative, i.e., when he suddenly appears in his own poem and uses his power as author to stop the Kauravas from murdering Yudhisthira. In the memorable scene that follows, Janamejaya, the young ruler to whom the poem is told and who accompanies Vyasa when he intervenes in his poem, then asks Vyasa why, if he can stop this crime, he cannot stop the pending war. Vyasa’s answer, “some acts a word can check; others nothing can stop,”72 acknowledges a fundamental limitation of word and text in the world of The Mahabharata. But since Vyasa is the author of that world, his answer finds a subtle parallel with the limited authority that a text can exercise over performance. In short, Vyasa concedes that he is the author of events he cannot control, regardless of his intent—events with a life of their own that he must finally accept.
Combined with the Brechtian undercurrents of Brook’s adaptation, the implications of Vyasa’s concessions have to be counted among the least explored, yet pressingly relevant, aspects of Brook’s handling of The Mahabharata. They position the Brechtain undercurrents of Brook’s adaptation at a crucial crossroads with poststructuralist theory. By highlighting the uncontrollable and autonomous relation any performance has to whatever we might deem to be the intent of any text or author, Vyasa’s comments strike at the very foundation of the critiques of Brook for his infidelity to an elusive textual authenticity and for not adhering to the authorial or even cultural intent of The Mahabharata. All three of these issues—textual authenticity, authorial intent, and cultural intent—have less to do with adaptation than, to borrow phrasing from W. B. Worthen, “with the way that we authorize performance [and] ground its significance.”73 In this respect, Vyasa’s acknowledgment that his work generates events beyond his control suggests, first, that the poem as a text is much more than—and by no means subordinate to—the poet’s own intent and, second, that his words (his text) cannot ultimately restrict the events or performances they generate. Vyasa thus acknowledges the existence of complementary, parallel realms of slippage and jouissance that place the former textual realm in a dynamic, but not authoritative, relation with its performative counterpart. These coexistent realms of slippage and jouissance comprise the fundamental condition of The Mahabharata itself prior to any adaptation one might venture today: a text that is without stable authorship and that is the source of abundant theatrical and performative traditions.
Such qualities resonate well beyond Brecht’s distinction between the mysteries of ritual and the pleasures of theater. Derrida’s reflections on Artaud’s anti-theological theater, for example, use this notion of coexistent realms of jouissance as the cornerstone of an argument for a liberation of performance from “an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation.”74 Like Brecht’s distinction between ritual and theater, Derrida’s argument posits this liberation as the basis for performance that, grounded in immediacy, is its own authority, and “is not a representation” of a previously existing text.75 It hardly could be otherwise. As Derrida notes, the imitative and reproductive dimensions of textuality itself give rise to a slippage and play in signification that make impossible an adequate representation of a text on the stage. But rather than concluding that performance is thus a poor representation of an inexhaustibly rich literary textuality, Derrida argues that the impossibility of representing the dramatic text throws the theater back upon its own resources, giving rise to an equally inexhaustible (visual) economy of signs, as well as to a space, as Vyasa tells Janamejaya, where words do not have the power to check or stop.
The implications of Derrida’s arguments are by no means limited to a liberation of performance from the authority of the text. Even though these arguments tend to offer Brook’s controversial adaptation a certain degree of cover, they only do so by simultaneously subverting his authority as director. The logic of that subversion is relatively transparent. As signifying systems, the languages of the stage not only play upon but also parallel the play and pleasure of the written word. Just as any text is more than its author, so too (arguably) is any performance more than its producer or director. In fact, when poststructuralism would teach us that Vyasa’s acknowledged limitations are merely the plight of any author, that very lesson has direct relevance to our understanding of the signifying nature of performance. While it may be true, as Worthen has deftly argued, that performance as a concept coincides with what Roland Barthes “means by a text,” and that performance is to the “material text” (the physical, printed page) what “text” is “to the authorial work,” performance, irrespective of its relation to a piece of literature, also moves from a stage of directorial work into an autonomous field of signification.76 Authorial intent, inasmuch as it can be reliably identified, is a component but certainly not the completion of any text, and if it is true that every author must contend with the subtleties of a written language the meanings of which cannot entirely be contained by the intent of the author, is not the same true of directors and their manipulation of the languages of the stage? As sympathetic as one might be to the legitimate criticism leveled at Brook both for his arrogant cultural insensitivity as a visitor in India and for his naive liberal humanism as a motivating force behind his directing, those very critiques tend to have a blinding effect on the multiple ways in which Brook’s production of The Mahabharata defies containment within the intent of its director, and thus serves as a critical irritant rubbing against the very attitudes Brook embraced in putting his production together.
Severed from analyses that measure Brook’s The Mahabharata against the problematic intent of its producer, the adaptation falls back upon its own resources. It is there that the Brechtain undercurrents of Brook’s piece rise to the surface of the production and carry it in a decisively different critical direction. One need not look far for a theoretical accounting of this shift in critical currents. By slightly modifying Barthes’ famous argument that the death of the author is the beginning of the text, one begins to get a very different sense of performance than has dominated the critical reception of Brook’s adaptation, a notion of performance that equates the beginning of a production with the death of the director, thereby shifting the critical focus from the director to the audience. The logic of this shift is found in the final passages of Barthes’ seminal essay “The Death of the Author.” There he presents the following argument:
A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.77
The destination to which Barthes refers is the reader, whose birth, as Barthes announces in the final sentence of his essay, “must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”78 Within this key definition of the text lie the structural foundations of a comparable definition of intercultural avant-garde performance, which, like Barthes’ notion of the text, is made of multiple acts and drawn from many cultures, with “one place where this multiplicity is focused”: the audience, “not, as was hitherto said,” the producer. As with the case of the text, a performance’s “unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Likewise, the birth of the audience “must be at the cost of the death” of the producer.
It has been more than forty-five years since Brook made the following claim in his legendary prescription for the theater, that small book called The Empty Space: “No one seriously concerned with the theatre can bypass Brecht. Brecht is the key figure of our time, and all theatre work today at some point starts or returns to his statements and achievement.”79 To return to Brecht here in these considerations of Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata is not only to affirm Brook’s pronouncement from thirty years ago. It is also to argue that the path back to Brecht is a path that runs counter to the expressed intent of Brook’s adaptation. For just as Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata pivots on a notion of the death of the author, so too do the Brechtian undercurrents in Brook’s production pivot on a notion of the death of the director. Significantly, the death of the director, inasmuch as it is intertwined in Brook’s adaption with a latent Brechtian context, pivots on an avant-garde conception of the audience that coincides with Barthes’ shifting of critical focus from the author to the reader. The Brechtian strategies of estrangement and interruption posit the audience as a diverse body “capable of thinking and of reasoning” and of adopting “a critical attitude,” an audience capable, in short, of gradually recognizing that Brook’s The Mahabharata has more to say about the processes of representation than it has to do with representation as such.80