THEATER
Theater for a New Audience
The Prisoner
"A man sits alone outside a prison. Who is he? What is he doing there? Is he free? Or is he the prisoner?"
“Red earth of somewhere, not European…In The Prisoner, the stage has a look that has come to be associated with the work of Peter Brook…and when an elderly white man appears (an understated and slightly self-mocking Donald Sumpter), it is, indeed, to introduce a story that began for him long ago, during a journey in a distant land.
Outside a prison…a man sits, staring at its walls. Asked what he is doing, he says that he is there “to repair”…In this version of the story by Peter Brook and his collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne…the audience learns almost immediately what his story is and what crime he committed.
It is a peculiarly shocking one, committed under shocking circumstances…a story which actually implies a consensual sexual relationship between a 13-year-old girl and her father.
Yet for reasons that soon become clear, the man cannot believe in himself as a righteous avenger of the girl’s abuse; in Hiran Abeysekera’s beautiful central performance, we see him, over the years, feel his way towards a resolution, through his interactions – often random, but somehow meaningful – with local people, visitors, passers-by. And the whole show, at a brief 70 minutes, achieves a magnificent balance of stillness, relaxation and narrative tension; compelling us to pause, to breathe and to reflect, but also moving the story towards its end with the inevitability and energy of a natural force, harnessed by an absolute master.”
-The Scotsman (Edinburgh)
The National Theatre’s The Prisoner is a moving example of Peter Brook’s “late style”
The playwright’s latest work nods most fondly to two classical texts he is connected with: Oedipus and Hamlet.
Two Peters – Brook and Hall – were the leading directors of English classical theatre after the Second World War. Their work went in radically different directions: Hall ran big buildings (the RSC and National) and encouraged new writers, while Brook retreated to Paris, working at a small customised playhouse on experimental, trans-cultural works, researched and rehearsed for years.
Yet though Brook was the elder of the two men, he has remarkably, at the age of 93, brought his latest work, The Prisoner, to London only a week after Hall’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey. The coincidence is poignant and instructive. Hall’s published Diaries, while agonising over some fight with the government, Arts Council or theatre unions, wander into envious reveries about Brook, who represented a servant of art in a country committed to culture. Just after celebrating Hall heroically getting his hands dirty in the engine room of theatre, we get to reflect on the fruits of Brook’s easier, cleaner career.
Artistic “late style”, Edward Said argued, tends towards a concentrated presentation of a career’s themes and techniques, often with a stubborn final attempt to resolve obsessive contradictions and obsessions. The Prisoner can, without insensitivity, be described as an extreme example of this.
A touching sequence in the play – co-directed by Brook’s frequent collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne – involves birdsong, echoing The Conference of the Birds, Brook’s fabled nomadic production based on a 12th-century Arabic text. The modern writer who most influenced him is Samuel Beckett, and the set that David Violi has created might easily double for a production of Waiting for Godot: a few rocks and branches stand on a stage dirtied with earth.
A narrator called the Visitor – played by Donald Sumpter, a presumably deliberate bald, beaky lookalike of Brook – glosses the setting as “a faraway country”, but the casting suggests Africa, setting for Brook-Estienne pieces including The Iks (about a Ugandan tribe), The Suit (from a book by Can Themba) and projects with South African theatre-makers Athol Fugard, Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon. The text, though, nods most fondly to two classical texts connected with Brook: Oedipus, which he directed at the National in 1968, and Hamlet, the Shakespeare play to which he has most often returned.
The Prisoner has an Oedipal protagonist, Mavuso, who has killed his father after finding him in an embrace with Nadia, Mavuso’s sister. This variation on Seneca/Sophocles seems to stray towards Elsinore when the father’s ghost appears to Mavuso, whose dilemma – is revenge killing ever justified? – is exactly that of the Prince of Denmark. Having responded in the affirmative, Mavuso is punished by an “ancient” rite that involves sitting opposite a prison and watching it until he achieves spiritual freedom.
That image – fabulist, obscurely beautiful – is late Brook at his best. As for the rest, my own preference is for him as a Shakespeare director: his Beckett-influenced King Lear with Paul Scofield (filmed in a version available for streaming) remains the best of the 20 or so attempts at that play I have seen.
Brook’s work with Estienne aims for a theatrical Esperanto, creating pictures, gestures and sounds that will resonate anywhere. But the cost of this is an ideological generality. And weirdly, despite the long rehearsal times that were a justification for Brook’s French retreat, the actors sometimes seemed to be ad-libbing, loosening and lengthening lines in the published text.
In late style, Said identified a refusal to admit defeat. In The Valley of Astonishment, a Brook-Estienne piece about synaesthesia at the Young Vic in 2014, a key moment was described, rather than shown, because it was not actable. In The Prisoner, one scene features a real fire but an imagined rat. It seems unwise to direct us to what the art form can’t do. It’s a pleasure to applaud Brook on his late lap of honour. But I harbour a fantasy in which he stayed in Britain and worked on Shakespeare at the National and RSC.
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