Theatre review: Battlefield

It's probably a safe enough bet to say that Peter Brook is quite fond of the Mahabharata; he staged the entirety of the Indian epic poem 30 years ago, but that doesn't seem to have got it out of his system. Brook and regular collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne have returned to the story, although this time they mercifully don't have a 9-hour theatrical endurance feat in mind: Battlefield, from an adaptation by Jean-Claude Carrière, deals only with one section of the epic. In fact we very much enter in the middle of the story as the battle fought on the titular field has just ended; whole armies have been wiped out, and all that's left is for a couple of the mortally wounded to shuffle off the mortal coil, with a few parting words of advice for the new king (Jared McNeill) before he takes his throne. Much of this will take the form of fables and recollections.

Theatre review: The Valley of Astonishment

I'm always excited by the prospect of seeing Kathryn Hunter, one of the most extraordinary actors alive, on stage, so to see her in something distinctly underwhelming is more than a little disappointing. How much more so when legendary director Peter Brook and his regular collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne have chosen what should be an endlessly fascinating subject matter: In The Valley of Astonishment, Hunter plays Sammy Costas, a 44-year-old woman whose photographic memory excites scientists. Mrs Costas, it transpires, has synaesthesia, the condition that muddles the responses of the senses. So words can have a colour, numbers a taste, sounds a personality. It means everything she sees or hears automatically becomes part of a mental landscape she carries with her, and every memory can be easily recovered.

Theatre review: The Suit

In Sophiatown, a township of Johannesburg in the 1950s, a husband (William Nadylam) returns early from work to find his wife (Nonhlanhla Kheswa) in bed with another man. The man flees in his underwear, and as punishment, the husband makes the wife keep the suit he's left behind: It's to stay in their house forever as an honoured "guest," to sit with them at mealtimes and be taken for walks. Peter Brook, Marie-Hélène Estienne and Franck Krawczyk did a French-language stage version of Can Themba's short story several years ago, and now they've created a new version of The Suit in English. It's a piece of storytelling theatre that failed to engage me in the least, a dreary hodge-podge of styles that stretches a very bare story over 80 minutes in a rather mournful way.