Битеф

For an intense seven-day stretch the group entered a satellite city, Cergy-Pontoise, and saturated it with improvisations of all sorts in a great variety of sectors of the community, culminating in large-scale performances, in a non-theatrical space, of ’Timon’ and ’The Ik’. The improvisations attracted an audience for the main events which would never have gathered in a theatre building. Theatre in the deepest sense of the word is no anachronism in the 20th century: it has never been needed so urgently. After the present tour, the Centre will work on its major international project for the coming years, the Mahabharata, a vast Hindu epic from which most of the world’s myths and legends have descended. (A. C. H. Smith)

"'*■''4. fsm -ял The Ik are an African ЙЛшЁ tribe living in Northern Ж Uganda. They were once IBbv J tribe they supported themselves by hunting and gathering. In 1946 the government of Uganda ЩШ$l reduced their territory and turned part of in into a national park and game reserve. In the reserve, the Ж /А were forbidden to hunt and to fj gather wild fruits and vegetables. 'чЩРР 1 s.» jB They were supposed to become jP farmers; but to change from hunting and gathering to agriculture is a transformation that has taken some societies hundreds of years, others thousands. The Ik were required to alter their whole way of life immediately and without instruction. The result was simple: their situation made worse by constant drought, they starved. They lost nearly every quality that is supposed to differentiate man from animals and yet they survived. They survived without family, friendship, hope, love all the things we are taught are essential to society. Eighteen years later, an English anthropologist, Colin Turnbull, went to study them. In 1973 he published his experiences in his best-selling book The Mountain People. Turnbull had been at Oxford with Peter Brook. Fascinated by Turnbull’s account of the Ik, with its contrasting elements of an adenture story, an objective anthropological study and a moral treatise with mythic and poetic overtones, Brook set to work with Colin Higgins, the author of Harold and Maud, on a dramatisation. They were joined by Denis Cannan, who had worked with Brook on the RSC’s production of US, and later, for the preparation of a French text, by Jean Claude Carrière, Luis Bunuel’s collaborator. In his theatre in Paris a refurbished ruin called Les Bouffes du Nord Brook was rehearsing his Frennch

production of Timon of Athens. Two years before, he and the six actors who play The Ik had been on a long study tour in Africa. Drawing directly from Turnbull’s book, the actors now began to work in parallel with the writers. Building a hut in the corner of the theatre, they spent weeks facing the problem not of acting Ik, but rather, of bearing witness in their own way to the Ik predicament: adaptation to endemic famine. This had to be done with the minimum of props and costume and without make-up. The resulting text has been defined by Brook as the fusing of two opposed elements: the contribution of writers, coherent and thought-out ; and the physical contribution of actors, disorderly but vigorous and alive. For the English version, Brook, Cannan and the actors have worked directly with Colin Turnbull an experience that might itself have been dramatised by Pirandello, for Turnbull is the leading characted in the play. Attending a performance for the first time, he found the reenactment of some of his more horrifying experiences almost unendurable and had to force himself to stay in the theatre. The Ik, so far as anyone knows, are still there. Their story has disturbing implications for any society that is forced into rapid change, that fails to adapt to changing circumstances or places too much faith in human goodness.

everything heard §and seen During rehearsals Denis Cannan assembled a dossier of supplementary material. Part of this he cast into the form of an imaginary discussion on the issues raised by the play. On what grounds? Turnbull conceived a theory and then looked for the facts to fit it. He denies this in his opening chapter. ’I could not have had a pre-conceived notion if / had tried.. . Ifï brought any attitudes with me, enthusiasm as not one of the them; clinical observation was more like it ... It was to be more of a fact finding mission than the of testing some theoretical view ... ’ Karl Popper has written ; ’Clinical observations, like all other observations, are interpretations in the light of theoreis. ’ Surely he’s right. They cannot be anything else. Here are the opening words of the book. ’Any description of another people, another way of life, is to some extent bound to be subjective, especially when, as an anthropologist, one has shared that way of life. This is as it should be;