At a particular point in an interview about his 2013 solo performance of Mark’s gospel – *mark at La MaMa NYC  – George Drance SJ is asked a question about the humour in it. He agrees it is a little surprising to some but that there are humourous, ironic asides, or juxtapositions which make for moments of lightness, an example being the evil spirits leaving a possessed man and entering a herd of swine. Talking further about this Drance mentions that when directing a 5th century Sanskrit tale, Shakuntula and The Ring of Recognition, in 2010, he looked at a classical Indian text on theatrical practice which spoke of eight basic emotions being presented to an audience like a banquet – ‘there ought to be these different tastes’ – so that at the end of a theatrical evening they should have ‘a complete plate’. Drance suggests it’s how he likes to approach a text.Continue Reading

I was struck by something the theatre director Peter Brook said about his most recent production The Valley of Astonishment. It’s a minimalist 3 hander – ‘spare, delicate and distilled’ – about the workings of the human brain, which emerged from the work he’s been doing in the wake of his 1980s epic production The Mahabharata. He suggested that ‘when The Mahabharata was over, I was swamped with invitations – to do Beowulf, to do the Icelandic myths, to do the German myths – all that. Because I was now the Specialist on Old Myth.’ There was a reported chuckle and a follow up: ‘But I’m not in the myth business.’ Then a connection was made to his recent work: ‘So my question to myself and my close collaborators was: what could be a similar research into what human life is about, but from a different perspective and from present-day conditions? . . . We started this research into what the brain is.’Continue Reading