Read on the page in Dostoevsky’s novel the Grand Inquisitor’s logic

Read on the page in Dostoevsky’s novel, the Grand Inquisitor’s logic rolls on like a relentless juggernaut. Embodied on the stage, though, in Brook’s production, the unsettling power of Christ’s impassive presence is palpable. The more implacably Maurice Benichou’s Inquisitor makes his case, the more he looks as though he is coming unravelled inwardly. “He’s one of those people,” says Brook, “who can persuade anyone of anything – except, of course, himself.” The final line of the scene, “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man sticks to his idea”, suggests that under the ideological stubbornness the doubt has intensified.Brook seems to be arguing that theatre should intervene in the current turmoil rather in the manner of Dostoevsky’s Christ who declines to enter into debate but reaches beyond it with an eloquent and subversive gesture. “The more we worked on it, the more we saw that you can substitute ‘American’ for ‘French’ and ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shi’ite’ for the adherents of 11 and 12. But at the same time for us the great interest is not to do that literally. I’m sure that if we did exactly the same play spelling out the equivalents, it would be unable to go beyond what everyone is receiving day after day from television and newspapers.”What then, for Brook, is theatre’s true role at this time? It can, he says, help us “to catch glimpses of what our lives have lost and give us a fleeting taste of qualities long forgotten”.

What is terrifying now is that this century is a confrontation of religions, because Bush has been elected very largely as a ‘man of God’. With religious extremist versus religious extremist, the precious thing that religion is all about is lost.” I suggest that similarities with the current situation in Iraq must have struck them while they were rehearsing Tierno Bokar. It’s Western; it doesn’t want to know.”The director expands on the thinking behind the three plays. During our recent conversation in Paris, my tape ran out with a loud, insolent click, just as Brook was explaining some point of Hindu philosophy and bewailing how the word “spiritual” has become a dirty word in our culture “See,” he flashed, “even the machine won’t have it.

“The 20th century was based on two clear-cut things – capitalism and communism – and one knew where one stood. Brook took great delight in recalling how, when he was an undergraduate, he persuaded the notorious Aleister Crowley (then known as “the Wickedest Man in the World”) to hide in his bedroom so that he could create a sensation by suddenly producing him at the height of a college party. (Brook was evidently a precocious director offstage as well as on.) Crowley had stayed at the Randolph where he had scandalised a waiter who asked him for his room number by roaring, “The number of the Great Beast, of course – 666!” Brook can always see the funny side. For example, I once met him in London a few days before he was due to be invested as a Companion of Honour.

“I’m not sure,” he grinned impishly, “which spot the Queen touches you on for this.” On another occasion I interviewed him over tea at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. How dare the Redeemer come back and threaten to disturb the totalitarian set-up that has been created? It’s the wordless Christ, though, who delivers the coup de gr? in the kiss of forgiveness he plants on the astonished old man’s cheek.I went to Paris to see the three plays and to talk to Brook, who is as formidably alert and attentive as ever. He winces at being described as a “guru” and if that’s how he comes across in some interviews, it’s not his fault but a failure in the writing to convey the sly humour which frequently gives a curly twist to those high, wiry tones of his. The redoubtable Inquisitor informs Christ that the Catholic Church has had to rectify His unfortunate mistake of giving man the intolerable curse of freedom of thought. In La Mort de Krishna, a postscript to The Mahabharata, the divine hero comes to accept the wisdom that there are times when even a god must consent to die, while the third section, Le Grand Inquisiteur, dramatises the scene in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Christ returns to earth and is arrested by the Spanish Inquisition.

The charismatic oppositional figure here is Tierno Bokar, a humble teacher who achieved the spiritual humility to switch sides in the now violent doctrinal dispute, an exemplary act that leads to his ostracism and death.The piece is flanked by two one-man plays, both performed by Maurice Benichou. From these modest, almost banal beginnings, the situation escalated into massacres and martyrdom, linking a small African village to key policy decisions in the Second World War. Set in French-occupied Mali in the first half of the 20th century, the play charts how, for its own political ends, the colonial administration inflamed an initially peaceable doctrinal dispute among the Muslims over whether a particular prayer should be recited 11 or 12 times. The central piece (which will visit England next year) is the hauntingly beautiful Tierno Bokar, adapted by Marie-H?ne Estienne from Amadou Hampat?? book about the eponymous real-life village sage.