The prayers of Peter Brook
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/jan/17/peter-brook-eleven-twelve
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"'Violence is the ultimate laziness'
Yet only now is Brook finishing the play that was one of the drivers of that journey. Eleven and Twelve has been stewing away in his head for nearly 50 years. Played out on an almost bare, sand-strewn stage with a cast drawn from all corners of the earth, it is the essence of Brook: spare, deceptively simple, profound and magical, throwing open a trapdoor into a world where its audiences would never otherwise have tumbled. The work, which comes to London next month, is based on the memoir of an obscure Malian Muslim mystic, Tierno Bokar, a leader who put an end to a bloody religious war by conceding that his opponents were right. He would have passed unnoticed outside west Africa had not one of his disciples, the writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, bumped into Brook in the 1950s.
On one level, this story of a dispute between sufis (who seek oneness with God and nature) over whether a prayer should be said 11 or 12 times is an allegory on fundamentalism. It also works as a critique of divide-and-rule colonialism, with Mali's French rulers turning one group against another as demands for independence mount before the second world war. But perhaps it is most powerful as a parable on the sacrifice that tolerance demands, as Bokar is eventually ostracised by his own people.
"To be violent is the ultimate laziness," Brook says. "War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also an idol." To him, the tolerance practised by the UN – with its muddy compromises and horse trading, born of "old-fashioned English liberalism" – is not tolerance. "It is not taking the bull by the horns and saying from the start: whatever our differences, nothing is going to be the cause of violence between our tribes. That is the most difficult choice of all, and it is one that Tierno makes, knowing, like Martin Luther King, that he will have to pay for it.""
Yet only now is Brook finishing the play that was one of the drivers of that journey. Eleven and Twelve has been stewing away in his head for nearly 50 years. Played out on an almost bare, sand-strewn stage with a cast drawn from all corners of the earth, it is the essence of Brook: spare, deceptively simple, profound and magical, throwing open a trapdoor into a world where its audiences would never otherwise have tumbled. The work, which comes to London next month, is based on the memoir of an obscure Malian Muslim mystic, Tierno Bokar, a leader who put an end to a bloody religious war by conceding that his opponents were right. He would have passed unnoticed outside west Africa had not one of his disciples, the writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, bumped into Brook in the 1950s.
On one level, this story of a dispute between sufis (who seek oneness with God and nature) over whether a prayer should be said 11 or 12 times is an allegory on fundamentalism. It also works as a critique of divide-and-rule colonialism, with Mali's French rulers turning one group against another as demands for independence mount before the second world war. But perhaps it is most powerful as a parable on the sacrifice that tolerance demands, as Bokar is eventually ostracised by his own people.
"To be violent is the ultimate laziness," Brook says. "War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also an idol." To him, the tolerance practised by the UN – with its muddy compromises and horse trading, born of "old-fashioned English liberalism" – is not tolerance. "It is not taking the bull by the horns and saying from the start: whatever our differences, nothing is going to be the cause of violence between our tribes. That is the most difficult choice of all, and it is one that Tierno makes, knowing, like Martin Luther King, that he will have to pay for it.""
