British director Peter Brook is arguably the spiritual father of the Young Vic. From challenging the notion that realism was best to importing a European sensibility to these staid shores, his fingerprints are all over the theatre.
So 'Battlefield' feels apt – and quite a coup – for the Young Vic. It’s like a god deciding to drop in on his own temple. Unfortunately, the result is so ponderously self-important, you might find yourself wishing the 90-year-old had stayed away. Time catches up with everyone.
Brook and his long-time collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne have adapted ‘Battlefield’ from 'The Mahabharata', the 11-hour version of the sanskrit epic that Brook and French writer Jean-Claude Carrière staged in 1985. Interspersed with parables about the circularity of life, it deals with the aftermath of a devastating dynastic war in ancient India.
There’s some vivid imagery here, of conflict as a constant, of a world covered in bodies consumed by scavengers – sons and brothers reduced to body parts. And Brook and Estienne’s stripped back staging is effective in the fables, evoking the fire-side immediacy of oral story-telling, with a welcome playfulness.
But these moments, as well as a random spot of audience interaction, don’t compensate for the pretentiousness. Lines are delivered with such freighted seriousness, they sink. The declamatory style of performance shuts us out of engaging with the play – along with the drumbeat that accompanies every scene.
The effect is to make even the 70-minute running time drag. The vivid orange cloth covering the stage feels squandered, the backdrop to a production so certain of its profundity, it drowns itself out. This isn’t democratised theatre, nor is it alienating in a genuinely challenging way. Actually, at its worse, full of empty sound, ‘Battlefield’ veers close to theatrical cliché.