‘It’s like Game of Thrones!’ The return of India’s ancient superhero fantasy epic

When Antonin Stahly was nine years old, his mother took him to the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris to see a production of the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata, which translates loosely as “the great story of mankind”. More than 20 actors from 16 countries performed on a stage steeped in red earth and scarred by a water-filled trench; fire also played a leading role. Directed by Peter Brook , whom the RSC founder Peter Hall called “the greatest innovator of his generation”, and adapted by Luis Buñuel’s former co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière, this spectacular Mahabharata weighed in at nine hours, plus intervals. Even at that length, it represented a massive compression of its source text, which runs to 1.8m words. Brook and Carrière’s version has been likened to summarising the Bible in 40 minutes.

Audiences could devour The Mahabharata in three parts over successive evenings or as an all-day weekend marathon; in some outdoor venues, such as the limestone quarry in Avignon where the production premiered in 1985, it began at dusk and climaxed just as the dawn sun lit up the sky. Stahly saw it in a single noon-to-midnight sitting. “It was like a superhero fantasy,” he says, still sounding awestruck. “It had Bhima, the strongest man on Earth, and Bhishma, who has the power to live for ever. Arjuna was the best warrior. And then there were all the gods. It was amazing for me, because I’m half Indian, but I wasn’t brought up in an Indian context.”

I said I wouldn’t allow them to show it. They said: ‘We’ll just wait until you’re dead’

Simon Brook

During an interval, Stahly met Brook and his longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne. “I must have been the youngest one there. They asked: ‘Are you enjoying it?’ I told them: ‘Of course!’ So Peter said: ‘You can come and see it again whenever you want.’ I had a cushion reserved for me at every performance. After school, I would take the Métro to the theatre.”

Then came the kind of plot twist that usually happens only in movies. When the main child actor fell ill, Stahly was asked to fill in as the boy to whom the poet Vyasa tells the entire yarn. He stepped out of the audience and into the fantasy, like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo. “It felt very natural,” he says. “I was continuing to listen to the story, but as a spectator and an actor at the same time.” So began an 18-month adventure during which he was taken out of school to tour with the show as far afield as the US, Japan and Australia.

Also in the cast was Hélène Patarot, who hadn’t made it through the initial audition process, but got a call from Brook after his first choice, Tilda Swinton, dropped out. Patarot’s professional stroke of luck turned into a personal one when she met her fellow cast member Ciarán Hinds , later the star of Belfast and There Will Be Blood; they are still married today. “Hélène was asked to keep an eye on me when I came over to Paris,” says Hinds. “And then …” He gestures to his wife sitting beside him. “But finding a partner wasn’t a prerequisite!”

Rehearsals involved everything from udu drumming to archery. “We did a lot of fantastic preparation without actually using it,” says Patarot. Hinds adds: “It was about learning to surrender, to allow things to flow without forcing them.” Once the world tour ended, Stahly, Hinds and Patarot reprised their roles in Brook’s six-hour TV adaptation, shot in a studio near Paris. Material from that was then reshaped into a three-hour cinema version, which is about to be screened in an 8K restoration at the Venice film festival, 35 years after its premiere there.

The restoration was made possible by Brook’s son, Simon, who fought for nearly five years to get his hands on more than 2,000 reels of celluloid. That meant unpicking complicated rights issues as well as dealing with (and even suing) those who were reluctant to surrender the material without a fight or, says Brook Jr, the payment of a prodigious ransom.

His father, who died in 2022 , was kept in the dark about the obstacles. “He didn’t know quite how bad the situation was,” says Brook Jr. “There was no point stressing him out.” At one point, the entire back catalogue of the film’s late producer was snapped up by a third party, even though Brook Jr had already obtained the rights to The Mahabharata. He says: “I said I wouldn’t allow them to show it, so they’d be stuck with a film they couldn’t screen. They said: ‘We’ll just wait until you’re dead and then deal with your children.’”

Brook Jr and The Mahabharata go way back. “I was 13 or 14 when I first heard my parents and Jean-Claude talking about this thing I could never quite pronounce. All I knew was that it was this great Indian tale, bigger than The Iliad and The Odyssey, bigger than the Bible. I hadn’t realised it was such a swashbuckling, entertaining adventure. It’s like Game of Thrones.”

Philosophical dimensions have helped ensure its longevity. “On the surface, it’s a classical story about good and evil. But, as it goes on, you realise it’s not that simple. That moral complexity is what I think my father was attracted to. It’s a fascinating guidebook on how to live your life, without actually giving you any answers.”

As a budding photographer, Brook Jr was invited at 15 to document the initial two-month research trip to India which his father was taking with Carrière, Estienne and the musician Toshi Tsuchitori. “The energy was extraordinary, but travelling around was quite hard. If you wanted to make a phone call, it had to be booked days in advance. And my dad was always changing his mind: ‘Oh, let’s stay in this place two days longer …’ It was complicated.”

He first saw the finished show through the night in Avignon. “I’m a terrible theatregoer, so the prospect of nine hours sitting on a bench was ghastly. But I was mesmerised.” Watching the film, however, he thought there had been a serious mistake. It opens with Stahly wending his way backstage at a theatre, through increasingly craggy and candlelit recesses, eventually coming across Vyasa (Robert Langdon Lloyd) sitting at a campfire. “I remember thinking: ‘Why is there a fire extinguisher on the wall? Why can we see the fuse board? Where was continuity?’” Then he understood what his father was doing. Stahly explains: “You see it recently in the modern-day scene in The Zone of Interest . It’s a way of saying: ‘We’re entering this past world, but it’s all still here with us.’”

The rest of the filmed Mahabharata is relatively pared back. “The challenge was to tell the story without going into a kind of decorative folklore,” says Chloé Obolensky, the production designer for the stage and film versions. While not as austere or bare-bones as, say, Lars von Trier’s Dogville (itself inspired by the RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby), the picture still operates visually via suggestion and evocation. “It invites us to help create our own environment, whereas movies usually just show them to you,” says Brook Jr. “It makes you work a little bit. There aren’t any elephants, for instance.” Who needs elephants when you have Patarot giving birth to a giant iron ball that is split into 100 sons?

Although Stahly had been with The Mahabharata since he was nine, he says he was not tired of it by the time shooting began three years later. “But making a film is so different from theatre,” he says. “The dream bubble had kind of popped.” As a violinist and actor with his own theatre company, he carries Brook’s lessons with him today. “The biggest thing he taught me was the act of listening and being present. That went so deep. It’s lasted all this time.” No regular theatregoer can escape reminders of Brook’s stagecraft. “Whenever I see plays that use a line of fire inside the theatre, I know that it comes from Peter. I know it’s a quote from his work.”

For Brook Jr, the relevance of The Mahabharata lingers on. “I think it should be read by every leader, every politician. It’s something my father and I discussed before he died. It’s frighteningly prescient about the destruction of the Earth, brothers killing brothers, the Earth rebelling. The Mahabharata speaks to our times – but then it’s been doing that for thousands of years.”

• The Mahabharata will screen at the Venice film festival on 5 and 6 September