For the 'Mahabharata', from '74 onwards, a year after the Bouffes du Nord opened,
we were looking for new subjects for plays, and we attended a conference,
given by Philippe Lavastine, talking about Ancient India, the power of royalty
and he cited the 'Mahabharata', which we didn't know. No one knew about it in the West
except maybe via the 'Bhagavad-Gita', its central piece, a very well known text,
extremely dense, the most famous sacred text in the Eastern world.
So Lavastine initiated both of us to the 'Mahabharata', told us about it at his place
and we decided to take it up, it was 3.00am, and we shook hands on it.
We often talk about that night with Peter, saying, 'We'll do it,' even
though it's a gigantic story, 12 times longer than the Bible.
It is the fundamental poem of the whole Indian culture,
therefore the difficulties were gigantic, and he said, 'We'll manage it’.
And he said two things the following days that helped me a lot, 'We'll do it whenever we do it, no time limit.
We will do other stuff in the meantime, we will do it when we are ready'.
And indeed, it took us 11 years before we tackled it. And then he said,
'It will be as long as it needs to be. Don't worry about it, let’s see what we can tell’'
And once we started on it, we ended up with a nine-hour play, shown over three evenings.
And from time-to-time, once per week, we would do a marathon,
starting at 4.00pm until late into the night.
That experience was an exploration of the poem and of India,
where we often worked with Indian theatre groups from all traditions,
to watch how they work on a given scene,
although we knew we could not work on it the same way, since we weren’t Indians,
and we had to work on it in French then in English, which involved adapting the wording.
How do you translate Sanskrit for the characters called
Dhristadyumna or Dhritarashtra can you keep their names?
If you say in French, 'I have seen Dhristadyumna' will the audience remember who that is?
That identification of a character and a name and an actor
that was the start of never-ending problems that were solved by all of us.
It was a world-wide success, we achieved everything possible from it,
and had the feeling that we helped the world discover
something that really is worthwhile, a very beautiful poem.
Because we, in the Western world, have been great at forcing our Shakespeare,
Picasso, Molière, Chopin and others onto the rest of the world,
but we've always closed our doors to their own Shakespeare, Picasso and Mozart.
We are separated from those cultures with walls
which are difficult to pull down because they are invisible. We don’t even notice it.
It is still the case today. There is some cultural egocentrism in the West,
and particularly in Europe, shared with the United States,
even closing in on themselves, which is dreadful and quite invisible.
So that was a great adventure, it was a breakthrough,
along with hundreds of workshops we did everywhere, theatre days all over the world.