BATTLEFIELD?

Last week we travelled over 500 miles to see Peter Brook’s new production, Battlefield, a brief (70-minute) excerpt from the immense Mahabharata – which last he produced as a 9-hour stage performance 30 years ago. Battlefield is set after a vast battle that left “millions dead” and brought a new king to power after a bitter struggle between two clans. In the aftermath, the new king confronts his predecessor and uncle, his mother, and a variety of other characters that include the god Krishna and the personification of the River Ganges. All is done on a virtually empty stage with four actors and a Japanese virtuoso drummer. The review in Singapore’s  Straits Times gives a good idea of it.

What interested me particularly was the grave fatalism expressed. Man has no choices, but (and) must accept the full weight of responsibility. The new king is told that he will reign virtuously and happily for 36 years, and will then pass on the kingdom to a youth who will be the only survivor of a battle. At the play’s end, 33 years have passed, and the dreadful signs and omens are massing for a new apocalyptic battle – and we learn that the succession will be like the former one, and that there is nothing that can be done about this. Death rules every man; fate rules the life of humanity. Nevertheless, responsibility is all.

It is like a strange related version of existentialism. There, absurdity rules all; yet again one must accept responsibility and act with courage and virtue. The universe is, for the existentialist, nonsensical; for the mournful kings on the corpse-littered battlefield, entirely closed. “This victory is a defeat” says the winner, with infinite sadness.

It brought home to me, in this third week of Advent, the utter astonishment of what we are preparing for. That the closed, ineluctable universe of Fate should be cracked open by God is one thing; that God should decide to do so by entering into human life is another; that He should do so, not in glory or power or cosmic war or starring on CNN but as an anonymous infant in a remote pub’s stable on the East coast of the Mediterranean, cared for by a slip of a girl and a carpenter and visited by a few shepherds; that is completely astounding. Et incarnatus est, de spiritu sancto, ex Maria virgine, et homo factus est. And with that, the terrible cycle of fate, the unyielding melancholy of the kings on the battlefield, is broken. Light floods in. Angels sing.

In paganity, Yuletide celebrates the return of the light; but there will always be a return of the dark. The glass is half full, but half empty also. There is no escape, no opening in the pagan universe. We can celebrate, briefly, but the cycle is unending.

Et homo factus est announces Emmanuel, “God with us”. Not to depart again. It announces the Cross; but the Cross issues in the Resurrection. Death does not rule all. We may celebrate cyclically; but what we celebrate is done. It happened, once and for all, in specific, knowable and known, points of time and space.

Right now, it’s still dark, in every sense of the word. Days are short, horrors happen, hate and foolishness abound. But there is a glimmer of light, and in the distance, very faintly, a sound as of angels rehearsing.