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.’

Of course, over many years Brook has said much else about myth, but initially what struck me here was the way in which he saw himself cast as the myth man – meaning ‘old myth’ – and declared it to be a kind of business; a business which you’d probably want to avoid if you were interested in exploring our lives. It’s clear as to why he might have thought this way, and how myth might be considered a special, antique province, but what if myth were a way of thinking about and imagining the world in which we live? Not so much a business as a way of being in the world whose importance was that it enabled our story to be told?

This runs contrary to the way we use myth in everyday conversation to mean untrue, not based in fact etc. Of course, given that it’s a protean term there are many meanings that attach to myth. Among them, myth as the colourful, bloody spin we put on things; or ‘the secret code of story’, providing ‘a structure for storytellers and screenwriters’; and myth as ‘a language of primal desire and hope’ – as one writer described it – which I was referring to when we began the project.

A slightly different emphasis emerged from the work Peter Brook did with the English poet Ted Hughes back in the late 1960s. Hughes wrote a version of Seneca’s Oedipus which was performed at the National Theatre in London in 1968. Irene Worth played Jocasta and she later said: ‘Ted had made a mighty speech for Jocasta about birth which I simply wasn’t up to. I should have been mammoth and monumental. Alas, I was only Whistler’s Mother …’ Myth is sometimes thought of as ‘mammoth and monumental’, or at least pretty intense and intensity is what drew Hughes to Aeschylus, Lorca, Racine, Seneca, even Ovid. As the director Tim Supple wrote after his death: ‘To make it clear, to render it unshakeable and specific – what a great purpose for the theatre. But then to see what it is: to recognize that the sum total of words and actions can reach mythic, primitive force, that theatre can be a sensation that leaves us breathless and shattered. This was the challenge with Hughes and his work.’ No doubt this is part of the attraction of the Greek tragedies and Racine and even Ovid for theatre companies big and small in the 2000s: not the ‘mammoth and monumental’ so much as an occasion for intensity, often with a touch of the grotesque.

It’s a reminder too that we like our myths to be highly crafted in the Greek and Roman style; but then what do we make of myths that aren’t so polished? Maybe jerry-built from odds and ends, not given to ‘breathless and shattered’ intensities. Are there such? There are many different ways of myth-making, not just the Greek way which we tend to universalise, and 4 Mysteries Project is based in an understanding that the four gospels are an example of this. Elsewhere on the website there’s this suggestion: ‘Perhaps the closest thing to them is the storytelling of indigenous peoples e.g. native American ways of telling a story. Often done in a no-nonsense style – they don’t set out to impress – they have a disarming quality, a frankness, a lightness of touch. They’re not necessarily humorous though they’re moving that way …’; which is, I think, what George Drance was alluding to in my previous post about his work, when he spoke of a lightness of touch in Mark’s gospel.

I find something akin to this in the much loved 2003 Kneehigh Theatre production of Tristan and Yseult which continues to tour far and wide. I’ve always liked what the director Emma Rice said at the end of her Foreward to the published text: ‘We are left with a script rich in detail, simple in its telling and true to the heart of the ancient myth.’ Whatever about ancient myth and for all the differences, it’s something you might aim for, I thought, in developing performance scripts of the gospels.

If you’re intrigued about the gospels as myths, or even poetic stories, there’s more about it on the website. Here’s a snippet: ‘Working in a performance way led us to conceiving of them as mythic creation stories, but unexpectedly so. They’re not biographies of Jesus, they’re stories about one becoming many, and many becoming one – about the fusion of groups and the risen Jesus in one body: the body of Christ then isn’t a he, it’s a ‘he/we’. This re-creation story is the central myth that the different mythic worlds of the gospel feed into. So the mythic refers to the fact that the Jesus life story doesn’t end with death …’

In fact it ends with us. Myth enters in when we ask the question, ‘what meaning does it have for us?’ – rather than only ever ask, ‘what really happened?’ In the end my sense is that myth brings us into a more interesting story because it’s our story.

This is what Peter Brook was wanting to get at when he took the tack that he did in his work: but these myths too enable us to do that – to consider what human life is about from ‘a different perspective and from present-day conditions.’