Tradition, modernity and Peter Brook

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

The word ‘tradition’ (meaning ‘to restore,’ ‘to transmit’) contains multiple meanings. No single sentence can explain it, as it means different things to different people. To explain tradition in simple terms signifies ways of thinking or acting inherited from the past. It can also be connected with words like custom or habit. We often use sentences like: ‘It’s part of our classical tradition or folk tradition or we bow down to the values of our tradition.’ When tradition becomes beyond questioning, then we are in trouble. It’s a rod that hangs on one’s head, absolving you of decision-making, in life and in the arts.’

Very often, in theatre, tradition can be seen as preservation of a form. When that happens, tradition becomes fossilised and mummified. For any real interaction with tradition, the present moment has to be taken into consideration. Tradition may belong to the hoary past, but the traditional performance is being watched by an audience at this moment, hence it becomes part of modernity. The analogy that comes to mind is of a phoenix that rises over and over again every night under the spotlight, with the accompanying applause.

The moment you enter a theatre space, you are alert to the fact that you are in a ‘make-believe’ world. In a play, an actor can become many characters — gods, demons, trees, animals, both living and non-living, that are temporarily conceived for the stage. Does that make theatre a place for suspension of disbelief? Perhaps for a short duration. Sometimes I wonder if it is conceptualised in the word ‘lila’ or ‘maya’, a place for illusions, where magic can be made to manifest. What I do know is the power of transformation of an actor into a character, sliding from the ‘real’ to the ‘imaginary, and the alchemy that is ignited by this encounter. When human beings ceremonially transform into gods and demons in living traditions — from Ram Lila to Kathakali, Terukkuttu to Theyyam — the audiences, through these performances, visit the spirits of their ancestors, converse with the gods and identify with the mythological characters. It is immediate, insistent and palpable. The chimera created through persistent drumming, smoke and fire, grandiose headgears and exaggerated make-up, render the performance more powerful and truthful sometimes, than everyday reality.

Modern theatre does not have a codified system of viewing or training as the traditional arts, yet there exist a host of clichés, which directors and actors dip into constantly. Clichés have become a form of iconography, an exhausted toolbox. We speak about the hero being romantic, the king being noble, and the damsel being in distress, and so on and so forth. We are from the day we are born handed a list of what we should or shouldn’t do. These templates exist in the creative spaces, too, strewn like debris to pick and use. From Sanskrit plays to Shakespeare, and from Greek tragedies to modern playwrights, stereotypes have infiltrated and ambushed any possibility of fresh thoughts and ideas. We are constantly battling, our imaginary bayonets poised in anticipation to weed out the dross. But like termites, they attack and spread, in subterranean, hidden and invisible ways, and insidiously enter our creative spaces. We see plays done by good actors in the proper way, dressed in costumes that go with the idea of a classical play, and feel a sense of comfort of being in a familiar artistic space, where the vision of the classics has been retained with its canons intact. Every member of the audience feels secure as no status quo has been disturbed.

One has been trained to associate culture and tradition with a sort of unquestionable reverence. Sonorous voices, didactic speeches, long flowing costumes and boredom. Entertainment was reserved for the folk traditions, the comical, the farcical. When Bertolt Brecht announced that theatre must both instruct and entertain, the scenario went through a vertiginous dive. Entertainment was destigmatised. Laughter was not viewed as only belonging to the uncultured and to the irreverent, but became a subversive tool in the hands of storytellers. The court jester, the bhand, the mirasi spoke profound truths through the element of humour.

Let me share a story about Peter Brook, a director who is always urging himself and his actors to surprise themselves through the unexpected, the unfamiliar.

I recall the time he came to India to sensorially experience its sounds, smells, colours and visual imagery. Experiences were gathered and processed for a show that he was creating from the ‘Mahabharata’. Brook shared that when he read it, he was completely bowled over and considered it a profound and philosophical exposition relating to conflict; to him, ‘Mahabharata’ represented the anatomy of struggle itself. During his journey, he was invited to conduct a workshop at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, in 1982. The news spread like wildfire. Bharat Bhavan became a pilgrimage site temporarily and Peter Brook the reigning deity! Legends of theatre jostled with the hoi polloi.

He invited the stalwarts of theatre — Habib Tanvir, Vijaya Mehta and Satyadev Dubey — to choreograph the opening scene of ‘Abhijnanashakuntala’ by Kalidasa. Brook constructed the scene with his wife, the famous actress Natasha Parry. We were excited to see the four mise en scène created by the four powerful directors. Most directors, when they approach a classic, feel that someone before them has already defined the scene, and the cultural memory plays its role in the creation of the role and its structure. Brook carried no such baggage and neither any clues of the character. Parry’s Shakuntala was complex and compelling, dissolving our stereotype template of the classical heroine.

Brook had cracked the surface of things. He prised open the clichés that existed in theatre by challenging and transforming it into something fresh and unanticipated. A new Shakuntala took birth, radiant, seductive, seething with desire.

Theatre functions at the present moment. It exists when the audience and actors meet and their disparate worlds come together. The reason why we create theatre is to savour for a brief moment a different world, where we can imagine fleetingly something magical that collectively integrates us.

Modernism brought tradition alive and tradition made modernism thrive and mutate. Tradition is not something out there, part of a past history, neither is it a static phenomenon, but a dynamic and pulsating presence that informs modernity.

Join Whatsapp Channel of The Tribune for latest updates.