Peter Brook is no stranger to Scotland, ever since the guru
of European and world theatre first brought his nine-hour epic, The Mahabharata,
to Glasgow in 1988. That was at the city’s old transport museum, which by 1990
had become Tramway, the still-functioning permanent venue that opened up
Glasgow and Scotland as a major channel for international theatre in a way that
had previously only been on offer at Edinburgh International Festival.
Brook and his Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord
company’s relationship with Tramway saw him bring his productions of La
Tragedie de Carmen, La Tempete, Pellease et Mellisande, The Man Who…, and Oh
Les Beaux Jours – the French version of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days – to Glasgow.
Thirty years on from The Mahabharata, Brook comes to EIF with
another piece of pan-global theatre as part of a residency by Theatre des
Bouffes du Nord, which Brook has led since he decamped to Paris from London in
the early 1970s. The current Edinburgh residency has already seen Katie
Mitchell and Alice Birch’s adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ novella, La Maladie
de la Mort, and Robert Carson and William Christie’s reimagining of The Beggar’s
Opera, staged here.
The Prisoner, co-written and co-directed with Brook’s
long-term collaborator, Marie-Helene Estienne, is a new work that comes from a
very real place.
“The Prisoner is a true story from forty
years ago in Afghanistan,” says a now ninety-three-year-old Brook. “I saw a man
who had been condemned to sit outside of a prison for his sentence, staring at
it. The look
in his eyes was so strong that up until now it’s stayed with me, and has made
me question; who was he and what was he doing there? I never found out what
this man had done and what his crime was but the look in this man’s eyes has
stayed with me. I couldn’t leave this story, because it doesn't leave me.”
Brook and Estienne tried various means of bringing The
Prisoner to life over the years, and it eventually found its form over the last
year.
“With Marie-Hélène Estienne, and
others, we made different moments as a film in one country and another,” Brook
says, “but none of them really corresponded with what we thought the story
demanded. About a year ago we decided that now was the moment for The
Prisoner, and for the theatre, a story for the here and now.”
In this sense, The Prisoner’s portrayal of an
incarcerated man chimes with much of what is going on in the world without ever
being didactic.
“Since seeing the man in Afghanistan,” says
Brook, “I have asked questions about who he was and what he was doing there. The
Prisoner looks at these questions and the themes surrounding them, which relate
to everyday aspects of our lives. It’s like a myth coming from a Greek tragedy,
far away, but at the same time, it's a detailed story about our current
situation.”
EIF’s French-tinged theatre programme this year is perhaps a
quiet acknowledgement of the fiftieth anniversary of the political and cultural
radicalism that erupted out of Paris in 1968. Beyond the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord
residency, Unicorn Theatre and Untitled Projects have just opened Stewart Laing
and Pamela Carter’s stage version of French enfant terrible Edouard Louis’
novel, The End of Eddy, while French choreographer Philippe Saire has already
presented his family-friendly show, Hocus Pocus.
Back in week one of the Festival, Druid Theatre presented production
of Samuel Beckett’s twentieth century classic Waiting for Godot, which was
originally written in French by the Paris-exiled Irishman. Such internationalism
is at the heart of Brook’s work.
“When starting the International Centre of
Theatre Research out of the Bouffes
du Nord, we wanted to show that it's possible to go
through boundaries,” says Brook. “We made our groups international. People of
different groups and languages coming together to work together. Audiences see
that, and that’s what all theatre is about – being together.”
The Prisoner, Royal Lyceum Theatre, August 22-26, 7.30pm,
August 25, 2.30pm.
The Herald, August 23rd 2018
ends
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