There’s a sort of spiritual terrorism at work in Peter Brook’s “Mahabharata.” It wouldn’t be going too far to call the entire enterprise an act of high-minded hostility. When you are staging an adaptation of an ancient Hindu epic that few people can claim to be familiar with, it’s an act of aggression to provide less information about each of the characters than your average production of Shakespeare would include in the program, and to list them not in order of appearance but alphabetically according to the names of the actors who play them—so that we have to sit with our noses in the program trying to figure out who is who. It’s like being in grade school again: sitting for nine hours on the uncomfortable bleachers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s newly-distressed Majestic Theatre on Fulton Street, thinking at nine-forty that it’s twenty long minutes to ten o’clock, after which there will still be an hour and forty-five minutes left to go. Actually, that “The Mahabharata” lasts nine hours turns out to have less to do with the vastness of Brook’s undertaking than one might expect. It’s not so much that a lot is happening onstage as that everything is allowed to happen very, very slowly. But the real problem with “The Mahabharata” isn’t that it’s long—“Nicholas Nickleby” was long—it’s that it uses essentially undramatic material. Nothing in the story of the great conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas gains by being acted out for us.
The production is vintage Peter Brook: elements of Brecht and Grotowski blended with a touch of Kahlil Gibran. There’s a certain amount of pseudo-Brechtian fussing with props—wagon wheels that are meant to represent chariots, and arrows carried toward their mark by human hands—and now and then a voice intones sententious pronouncements: “Take the disguise of your most secret desire,” “Victory and defeat, pleasure and pain are all the same,” “Death doesn’t kill anyone; creatures kill themselves.” Mostly, though, “The Mahabharata” is the kind of theatre created by a lot of people hitting things, ranting, rolling about on the floor, and pouring things on themselves. There are engaging moments, and even one or two jokes. An amusing magic trick is performed in the second part and sometimes there are interesting things to look at: puppets and processionals, brightly colored carpets and cushions, cloth of gold. Occasionally, a ring of fire springs up onstage with a line of fire behind it and that’s exciting. (“Please note,” says the program, “that during the performance of ‘The Mahabharata’ special effects and pyrotechnics will be used.”) But these are sops thrown to the audience, a reward for sitting in glum docility for so many hours.
It’s always exhausting to watch bad acting, and the international cast of “The Mahabharata” performs badly in many different ways. One actor favors the old-fashioned declamatory style where you speak your lines forcefully out to the audience; another prefers to shout directly at his colleagues. There’s a Polish style, an African style, a Japanese style, an Indian style, and an “international” style that is virtually unintelligible. The principal women are among the weakest performers: Miriam Goldschmidt, as Kunti, mother of the Pandavas; Mallika Sarabhai, as their wife, Draupadi; and Helene Patarot, as the vengeful Amba. And some of the men don’t fare much better. (I found Bruce Myers’ oleaginous Krishna especially hard to take.) But there are good performances, too: from Andrzej Seweryn, as good king Yudishthira; from Vittorio Mezzogiorno, as the great archer Arjuna; from Yoshi Oida, who doubles as a rapist and a sage, and, surprisingly, from the children, Nolan Hemmings and Antonin Stahly-Viswanadhan.
There is a certain kind of French afflatus that sits well with Oriental afflatus, and Brook’s collaborator on “The Mahabharata” was the French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere. With all the pageantry and phony mysticism going on in “The Mahabharata”—the divine imparting of “secret weapons” from sages to heroes—the whole thing gets to be like a cross between “Star Wars” and Paul Green’s “The Lost Colony.” But “Star Wars” never pretended to be part of a Next Wave. And outdoor cultural pageants like “The Lost Colony” care about the tradition they try to preserve. Peter Brook doesn’t really care about what “The Mahabharata” represents in eastern culture or what it might have to offer a Western audience. He’s interested in the threat of nuclear war. The the conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas is almost explicitly likened to two rival superpowers, and after a number of symbolic reminders that we’re all children of one father there’s a general bid for peace and brotherly love.
Brook seems to have grafted onto “The Mahabharata” a sensibility full of Western, modern concerns, and I can’t help thinking that he’s diminishing rather than demonstrating the poem’s appeal. I suspect what “The Mahabharata” has to offer a Western audience is a chance to glimpse human psychology refracted through the medium of poetry—like Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” another story collection that purports to tell the history of mankind. The stories in “The Mahabharata” are about people who fail or triumph because of individual traits so idiosyncratic as to make them seem like prototypes [avatars?]—even projections—of particular human fantasies and frailties. Draupadi, the woman who marries five different men, all of them brothers; Ghandari, who goes through life with a bandage over her eyes lest she see more than her blind husband; Amba, who walks the earth in search of a man to kill the lover she feels has wronged her; Uttara, the enfant soldat who goes off to fight an army single-handed; Yudishthira, the noble king with a weakness for gambling who loves to lose; Pandu, the man who commits a crime against passion and nature and is killed by a natural passion of his own; Bhishma, who takes a vow of celibacy to stave off conflict in future generations and ends up causing an epic war—they’re all of them metaphors, eloquent because of their extraordinary specificity. It seems a strange lapse on Brook’s part. Metaphors are his medium. He is, after all, the man who taught us to fill “the empty space” with Brechtian theater, and metaphors are what Brechtian theater is all about.
Alyson Reed’s performance as Sally Bowles in the current revival of “Cabaret,” at the Imperial Theatre, perfectly captures a particular kind of upper-class English party girl. It’s not that her accent is good. (Actually, it was ever so slightly erratic the night I saw “Cabaret.”) What’s extraordinary is what Miss Reed has done to the quality of her voice—giving it a weird, tinny breathiness and studied inflexibility of tone. She looks the part, too, in a way that Liza Minnelli never did: sort of brittle, yet brassy, yet sleek. Everything in her bearing and demeanor is quintessentially thirties—how she walks, how she stands, how she moves; and everything she does (the way she holds a long-stemmed cigarette or flutters her fingers in preparation for being partnered in a dance—like a gambler fluttering his hands above the chips) is in the service of an idea: something about the fragility of badness and a certain kind of little-girl promiscuity.
In other respects, too, this revival, directed by Hal Prince, is curiously felicitous. It seems meant both to re-create and to update his original 1966 production—which I, alas, never saw. There are costumes by Patricia Zipprodt, the original designer, dances staged by Ron Field, the original choreographer, and sets by David Chapman, based on the originals by Boris Aronson. And, of course, Joel Grey re-creates his performance as the Emcee. His stage version of the role is vastly different from the performance he gave in the 1972 movie directed by Bob Fosse—subtle and generous in that it doesn’t choose to dominate the show at the expense of Sally Bowles.
John Kander and Fred Ebb have somewhat altered their original score, eliminating two now-unperformable songs (“Why Should I Wake Up” and the embarrassingly folksy “Meeskite”) and substituting two new ones. I imagine, though, that the major difference between the original show and this revival results from Joe Masteroff’s revision of his own book, which reintroduces the hero’s bisexuality, an element that (except in the 1972 movie) had always been suppressed. The issue of the hero’s sexuality was left ambiguous both in the 1951 play “I Am a Camera,” which John van Druten based on Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories,” and in Isherwood’s own “Goodbye to Berlin.” But as Isherwood later explained in “Christopher and His Kind,” it was boys that took him to Berlin in the first place in an effort to find what his friend W.H. Auden had depicted to him as a homosexual heaven. The real-life “cabaret” where Isherwood met Jean Ross, the girl on whom Sally is based, and which is given the Wildean name of Lady Windermere’s Fan in “Goodbye to Berlin,” was a “boy bar” named the Cosy Corner. Actually, the Kit Kat Club, the cabaret that Kander and Ebb chose to use as a metaphor for the decaying Germany of the Weimar Republic, bears a closer resemblance to the heterosexual “dens of pseudo-vice” Isherwood describes in his memoir, where “screaming boys in drag and monocled, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets playacted the high jinks of Sodom and Gomorrah horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe.” Masteroff’s rewriting of Cliff as a bisexual (though Isherwood was not himself bisexual) goes some way toward correcting the lie that has been implicit in so many of the retellings of the story of Sally Bowles. It was never really about political loss or innocence, or nostalgia for prewar Berlin. The appeal of this story has always resided in its ability to evoke the wistful nostalgia that hovers about relationships between homosexual men and the heterosexual women who love them.
Perhaps it’s the zeitgeist that makes this production so surprisingly effective—something we bring with us to the theatre. For the rewriting of Cliff as a bisexual is not entirely successful (his lines have been changed but not his character), and Gregg Edelman is not always believable in this role. (He sings well, particularly in the upper registers, but he doesn’t seem like the type who would let a “wild unpredictable girl” just barge into his room and put down roots there.) As Fraulein Schneider, the woman who runs the boarding house where Cliff and Sally live, the veteran opera signer Regina Resnik is a disappointment. She has a deep, melodious voice, but she gives her lines an almost perfunctory reading and brings nothing of the resignation and rage that Lotte Lenya brought to the Weillean numbers “So What?” and “What Would You Do” (You can hear it on the original-cast recording.) Werner Klemperer’s performance as Herr Schultz, the Jewish greengrocer who sues for Fraulein Schneider’s hand, is affecting and mercifully lacking in the delicatessen humor Jack Gilford brought to the role. And Nora Mae Lyng is particularly winning as the boarding-house hooker. In fact, all the performances are good. There’s an odd self-consciousness about them, moreover, that helps to bail out aspects of the show that might seem hokey now. “Cabaret” is an old-fashioned musical. Though it was revolutionary in bringing the concept of Brechtian stage devices to the Broadway musical, using musical numbers to comment ironically on the action of the play rather than to advance the plot, it dates from a time when musicals could still ask an audience to believe that people just spontaneously burst into song. The principals in the current production—all except Miss Reed—seem a little uncomfortable singing to one another, as though they were surprised to find themselves doing so, which has the effect of proposing a twilight area between realism and self-conscious theatricality—like the one “Cabaret” itself inhabits and always will.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, November 9, 1987