Our team felt that exploring how this story has been told over the centuries was just as important as the story’s plot. Our telling blends traditional and modern, east and west, and includes various forms of Indian dance, storytelling, live music and even a Sanskrit opera! We’ve also tried to mimic many people’s real-life experience – receiving these stories through an interpretation and lesson, over a meal. Each of these forms of storytelling help to unlock Mahabharata’s meanings: they help us reach beyond words and narrative to access its spiritual and philosophical underpinnings. It’s rare to experience Mahabharata from beginning to end in one day. It needs time. It requires perspective. Its stories stay with you – their contradictions become the subject of conversations and debates, and as we age those meanings change. Miriam (Fernandes) and I have sat with this story for eight years. A lot has happened since we began. The best advice I can give to you is a line from our play’s Storyteller: ‘Don’t be confused by plots. Within the river of stories flows infinite wisdom. That is your true inheritance’.
A note from the director
Mahabharata was a story that played in the background of my childhood. I caught glimpses of it through a popular television series, a set of comic books and in the paintings and sculptures of ancient temples I’d visited in India. The characters infiltrated my imagination, but I never really knew the story – only pieces, episodes, the television theme song. I also knew Mahabharata through different styles of traditional dance. I watched numerous friends’ ‘dance graduations’, where nine of ten dances would inevitably be stories from Mahabharata . For thousands of years it has been told over and over, in many different ways. How could we tell Mahabharata today and have its messages resonate with modern audiences?
Ravi Jain Director of Mahabharata and Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Why Not Theatre
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