Through March 26
MAHABHARATA Why Not Theatre/Shaw Festival/Festival Theatre
By Augustine Warner
For those of us educated in the Western cultural tradition, that carries with it the belief we know all the facts about culture and the West’s supremacy.
That includes literature, with fiction starting with the oral traditions behind the war and blood of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” as well as the classics of ancient Greek theater and the Bible, which migrated across the world from its roots in the Middle East.
Of course, that’s not quite true.
Proof is on the stage of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Festival Theatre, an educational, entertaining, cross-cultural and marvelous joint production of the Shaw Festival and Toronto’s Why Not Theatre.
“Mahabarata” is hours on stage, afternoon and evening when I saw it, with a new production of one of the two classics of Indian literature, material going back to the same time Homer’s oral story telling was developing.
Be clear.
I must rely on the essential work of Miriam Fernandes, continuing storyteller of the entire show, as well as associate director, co-writer and adapter of the show with director Ravi Jain.
She takes us through this tangled story of family, blood and death.
I don’t read or speak Sanskrit which is the language from the beginning of the tangled story.
I used to be familiar with Latin and a smidge of Greek, from the Western cultural traditions.
That’s why I have to sit back and relax and let the words and music and plot and acting and staging wash across my seat in the audience.
But, I can see those human similarities in the bloody family feud which is the center of the “Mahabarata,” a struggle within a royal family over wealth, land and power.
Remember the Biblical story of the infant in a basket pushed into the river to wash away?
That shows up in this show, involving a royal prince.
There’s also a vast battle which kills a claimed million soldiers in a war governed by rules, like all fighting must take place in daytime.
And, as with the Greeks, the gods interfere and screw things up and, often, making situations worse.
Because this story is vast and tangled, it’s been cut into two halves, “Karma” and “Dharma” or
“The Life We Inherit” and “The Life We Choose.”
That reflects the Hindu religious views behind the entire tale.
This staged editing of this vast array of thousands of years of writing even includes a segment called the “Bhagavad Gita Opera,” featuring the amazing, soaring voice of Meher Pavri, a voice familiar to Canadian stages from musical theater, as well as many of the productions in Indian languages.
To make it clear, the Festival Theatre has the English translation of her singing projected above the stage.
That’s another part of the high-tech production of this show, amazing projections to help tell this story.
The production is scheduled for a world-wide tour.
It’s hard for me to comment on most of the performers except for the dynamic work of Harmage Singh Kalirai as the blind king Dhritarashtra, who presides over this civil war in his family and his kingdom.
Think of him as Prospero or King Lear in Western literature.
Or, as the blind king of a family which wrecks its kingdom in a giant power struggle, leaving lessons to travel down the river of time.
It’s a short run in Niagara-on-the-Lake for “Mahabharata,” but worth seeing both halves before the production hits the road or, probably, the airports.
While much of this script goes back into the mists of time, it survives.
Remember, on the day in 1945 when the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, stood in the New Mexico desert and watched the flash and the rising mushroom cloud of that first nuclear bomb and recited from the “Bhagavad Gita,” “I am time, destroyer of worlds. I have come to consume the world.”
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