We assembled around seven o'clock on Saturday evening in an amphitheatrical stone-quarry 14 kilometres outside Avignon after a boat trip up the broad-banked Rhone. As the sun edged down behind the cliff-face of the quarry, Peter Brook's production of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, began. Eleven hours later, with the birds singing in the Provencal dawn, the show finished with a vision of Paradise with sitars playing and candles bobbing gently in the onstage river.
We were the first audience at this year's Avignon Festival to have seen the Mahabharata as it should ideally be experienced: not as three separate evenings but, as in Jean-Claude Carriere's adaptation, a dusk-to-dawn epic dealing with the birth of heroes and legends, a world-shaking family quarrel and a final exhausted calm.
It was, in every sense, an unforgettable experience comparable to the kind of day-long ritual audiences must have undergone in Athens in the 5th century BC. One put up with the mild discomfort of the tip-up seats and the occasional bout of tiredness; for what one was seeing was the cycle of human affairs presented in a single night.
What is also worth stressing is that the Mahabharata is a triumphant vindication (if one were needed) of the work Brook has been doing in Paris over the past 11 years. There are still those who wonder why Brook has chosen to work abroad with his own international company rather than churning out product for our classical theatre.
But this production shows him forging a fabulous narrative theatre that combines the lyrical magic of The Conference Of The Birds, the austerity of Les Iks, the knockabout farce of Ubu. Holy and Rough theatre (to use Brook's own terms) combine in a work that is like Shakespeare's Histories in its vision of dynastic conflict and universal disorder.
Each of the three plays that make up the epic also has its own distinct tone. The first, La Partie de Des (The Dice-Game), is rich in myth and magic. It begins with Vyasa dictating "le grand poeme du monde" to a scribe and shows the origins of the two clans — the Pandava brothers and their cousins the Kauravas — whose conflict leads to global disaster. Kama, the child of the sun, is born in a billow of torch-smoke, wreathed as a boy in garlands while a bow and arrow is placed in his hand.
But although the first play shows the growing quarrel between the rival cousins and leads to the fatal dice-game in which the Pandava leader (Mathias Habich) gambles away his inheritance, it is full of piercing images of tenderness. At one point the five Pandava brothers all harmoniously share the same bride and lie down in front of her with their mother, Kunti, at their head.
And in the second play, L'Exile Dans La Foret, we get a sense almost of pastoral idyll as the brothers go into retreat and eventually become part of a court where an entertainer plays out a puppet-show behind a crimson curtain. But the inevitable conflict approaches and in the third part, La Guerre, we are plunged into a world of darkness, torchlight, smoke, bloodshed, the death of successive heroes, the destruction of kingdoms before the arrival of the dawn and a sense of healing harmony.
What does it all mean? On a narrative level, it is a basic decline-and-fall story of rival family factions destroying the very universe that is their inheritance. But what makes it enigmatic for a Western audience, unversed in Indian epics, is that moral blame is never apportioned, words like sin and evil are never used and that the great god Krishna foresees and laments the coming holocaust but seems powerless to prevent it.
If a general principle emerges, it is that human beings must find order within themselves to create an ordered universe; and to me there is one crucial exchange in which the Pandava leader is asked the miracle of life and says that "Each day death beats at our door yet we live as if we were immortal."
The ultimate meaning of le Mahabharata is for each individual to discover. But Brook gives it a direct link with our century in a monumental explosion of blinding intensity that bursts out of the quarry and fills the stage with sulphorous smoke: I met an Indian professor who said it was out of keeping with the original but to me it was a brilliant reminder of the looming destruction under which we all live.
For the most part, however, Brook evokes chaos and disorder through the simplest means: a shower of white arrows criss-crossing in the night, Kama propelling a single chariot.wheel across the sandcaked stage, warriors splashing heedlessly through the river that was once the source of creation. It is like an elliptical Wars Of The Roses. But it also ends with an intense Shakespearean feeling that, after the dark night of the soul, comes the overpowering human need for renewal.
Brook's international company also helps gives the work a universal quality. There is no attempt at a spurious Indian ethnicity; and there is a whole range of remarkable performances from Maurice Benichou as Krishna, regarding mankind's self-destructiveness with immeasurable sorrow, from Mamadou Dioume as a volatile, giant-like Pandava warrior, from Matthias Habic as the clan's blond, whipcord-muscled leader, from Mireille Maalouf as the eye-bandaged queen, from Bruce Myers as the war-forged Kama.
It is very much a story of mothers and sons, fathers and children and it is this that gives it a poignant human dimension as well as a sense of cosmic upheaval. Without question this production is the masterwork of Brook's later period and a tribute to the perseverance of himself and Jean-Claude Carriere in making an enthralling dramatic entertainment out of a work five times as long as the Bible.
I only pray we one day see it in Britain, it is an extraordinary philosophical epic that acknowledges death, destruction and decay while enhancing the mystery of life itself.
Obviously le Mahabharata dominates the Avignon Festival. But there are other productions of interest. In the courtyard of the Palais des Papes (where the Festival began with Jean Vilar's Richard II in 1947) the Comedie Francaise are staging a new production of Macbeth by their radical young director Jean-Pierre Vincent.
M. Vincent admitted to me wanly that he now concluded Macbeth was an indoor play; and there is something bizarre about seeing Macbeth bellowing his murderous thoughts to the four winds. Catherine Ferran is also obliged to play the later Lady Macbeth scenes in a vast, golden, Virgin Queen pannier-skirt that looked as if it could have shielded an army. I felt an intimate play was being given a misplaced epic staging.
Lessing's 1772 bourgeois tragedy, Emilia Galotti dealing with a heedless Prince's ruinous passion for a beautiful subject is also being given in the Cloitre des Cannes by the Theatre National de Strasbourg: the production was dry and cold but the play struck me as an Englightenment pasterpiece worth revival by one of our national companies.
The French tradition of mimed comedy is being kept alive by five sprightly young talents in a show called Marguerite Paradis: an almost wordless revue by Michele Guigon that lightly mocks the quirks and quiddities of love. Its ironic sub-title was "L'Histoire de Tout le Monde" which suggests that Peter Brook is not the only director at this year's clamorous Avignon Festival with aspirations to the universal.
