Battlefield is Peter Brook’s short stage work that takes up the Mahabharata after its great war is over. Its focus is Yudhishthira, the Pandava prince who wins the battle and then has to decide whether he can bear to be king. The work was created with co-director Marie-Hélène Estienne and scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and it runs about 65 minutes with four actors. The account below is drawn from Saumya Ancheri’s Scroll.in article of February 15, 2016, which was written as the play was preparing for a March 2016 presentation at Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. Its details describe the production as it was reported then, not as a current listing.
What Battlefield covers
The play begins where many retellings of the epic end. Yudhishthira, a Pandava who has defeated his Kaurava cousins, experiences the victory as a kind of defeat, standing among the ruin of families and allies. The play pairs his reckoning with Dhritarashtra, the blind king on the losing side, and asks how rulers account for a war that destroyed so much. The article quotes Estienne describing the central problem as Yudhishthira becoming king after “such a human massacre,” a question she said felt urgent given contemporary wars, political difficulty and environmental damage.
How it differs from the 1985 production
Brook’s earlier The Mahabharata is the reference point for the newer work, and the two differ sharply in scale and narrative focus. The figures below are those reported by the 2016 article; they were not independently checked against production records.
| Feature | The Mahabharata (1985) | Battlefield |
|---|---|---|
| Running time | Nine hours, reported as sometimes played from dusk to dawn | 65 minutes |
| Cast size | 25 performers | Four actors, from Rwanda, Belgium, the United Kingdom and the United States |
| Narrative focus | The broad conflict of the epic | The postwar aftermath, centred on Yudhishthira |
| Adaptation method | The source for later reworking | Retains a few lines and the central situation of the 1985 work, while adding other stories |
How the adaptation was built
Lines and situation carried over
Brook, Estienne and Carrière kept a small number of lines and the main situation from The Mahabharata. Nothing in the 2016 account suggests a full rewrite of the earlier text; the new piece is a much shorter work built on a narrower question.
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Stories added from elsewhere in the epic
To fill the shorter form, the collaborators drew on further Mahabharata stories. Carrière also connected the play to the Gita’s idea of the “most secret battle,” an inward struggle that he set beside the outward war.
The lake that asks questions
In the adaptation, Dharma appears in the form of a lake and questions the Pandavas. Carrière gave the exchange in the article’s account:
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“There was a line, in our adaptation, when Dharma, under the form of a lake, asks questions to the Pandava. One of the questions was: ‘Give me an example of defeat.’ And the right answer is: ‘Victory.'”
The article presents this as a line from this adaptation, not as a statement about every version of the Sanskrit epic.
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Cast, music and preparation
Travel and research
Estienne travelled in India, from Manipur to Kanchipuram, and in Nepal, meeting religious scholars, writers, dancers and theatre practitioners to hear different tellings of the epic. The article presents this as part of how the collaborators approached a story that exists in many regional forms.
Music and the avoidance of shorthand
Composer Toshi Tsuchitori spent months in India gathering musical material for the 1985 production. Brook advised him against familiar shorthand, such as sitar music used simply to signal an Indian setting. The score for that production also drew on musicians from Iran, Turkey and Denmark. For Battlefield, the article says Tsuchitori was to use West African djembe sounds.
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Long roots in Brook’s work
Brook first heard the battlefield episode while rehearsing an anti-Vietnam War play in the United States in 1966. In 1974, he and Carrière listened to Sanskrit scholar Philip Lavastine narrate episodes over six months. The 1985 staging came almost two decades after that first encounter. The article’s framing calls Battlefield Brook’s third engagement with the epic “in 40 years,” which counts the 1985 work, the 2002 La Mort De Krishna, which focused on Krishna foreseeing his end, and the present piece.
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Brook described the theatre as a shared space: “For me, theatre is the possibility to live, for an hour or two, in a space of concentration with the audience, a shared experience so that each may leave nourished by his own thoughts.”
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On the epic’s reach, he said: “The Mahabharata for thousands of years had belonged to its soil, India. Now, just like Shakespeare, it demanded to be opened to all humanity.”
Estienne’s remark gives the article its title: “As it is said so many times in the epic, the Mahabharata does not and cannot leave you. It is there in you and it develops. It is natural to go back to it.”
Filmed versions and where to find them
The 2016 article reports that Brook’s 1985 production was filmed. It describes a televised series that received an Emmy Award and a film that received a 20-minute standing ovation at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. The article does not name the Emmy category, and it does not establish whether either version is available to watch today. Readers looking for a recording should check current distributors directly rather than relying on a 2016 account.
For the text itself, the article identifies Carrière’s Mahabharata play script as the source adapted for Battlefield. It does not name a specific edition, so confirm title, publisher and edition before purchasing.
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Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Because the article is a February 2016 snapshot, its statements about the March 2016 Mumbai presentation describe that period. Later performances, casts and rights arrangements are outside what it can confirm.
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