Miriam Fernandes, co-creator and Associate Director of upcoming Perth Festival show Mahabharata, has just finished a day of rehearsals in Banff, Canada, and is giving up the first part of her Friday evening to chat to me over Zoom. Here in Perth, it is Saturday morning and I have just made my first cup of tea for the day.
We do the usual time and weather comparison (for her, below zero, for me, already reaching twenty-eight degrees and humid) and get stuck into chatting about the show that will arrive in Perth in February.
Mahabharata is not a new story, it is an epic poem and one of the oldest epics ever recorded at something like four thousand years old. It is an ancient Indian story about two royal families fighting for power, and like any great epic is still relevant, sometimes unfortunately so, today.
At the heart of Miriam’s Mahabharata (co-created with Ravi Jain) “we are looking at empathy and what it means to forgive, in order to build a world where peace is possible.”
Technically, Mahabharata is two shows as it is split into two parts that must be booked separately: part one, Karma, and part two, Dharma. Those who book a marathon sitting of both shows in one day on the weekend can also attend Khana and Kahani, a community meal and storytelling session between the two parts. This idea comes from the way people have been hearing this story for centuries: around a meal with family. Miriam tells me it is “an opportunity for people to step out of the theatre and experience the show around a meal like many people would, and have the story and the meaning of the story unpacked for you a little bit. You get to have a conversation about it because everything in the Mahabharata is up for debate. There’s no clear morality; it’s up to each person to decide so it’s great to be sitting around a meal and having the story explained and unpacked for you.”
Mahabharata. Photo by David Cooper.
Miriam is co-Artistic Director of Why Not Theatre, a company based in Toronto – where she was born and raised – and she has been part of the project since 2018 after it was begun by co-creator Ravi Jain in 2015. We discuss how since then “the world has changed so much, [there are] so many conversations around justice such as #metoo, black lives matter, the climate emergency. The play has felt more and more relevant, especially now that two wars have broken out in the time that we have produced this play. The relevance of the story feels like it’s always there, and whatever is happening in the world you see the story through that lens in that moment.”
The show is a massive undertaking for Why Not Theatre at every step of the way. Not only when taking thirty-five people on the road but from the very beginning of the creative process. “The writing to wrestle down this script for Ravi and I is a massive challenge. To stage it in a way that is both classic and contemporary, both east and west, a collision of both of these cultures has been a beautiful, lifelong artistic challenge that has inspired me so much. … The challenges are endless but the joy of the team and an incredible cast of musicians and opera singers, an audience feels that onstage it’s pretty special.”
One of Miriam’s favourite parts of the show (a cruel question to ask, I know) comes in part two, Dharma. The first section of Mahabharata she encountered was the Bhagavad Gita, which as a yoga teacher she read as a spiritual text to understand the concept of Dharma. It is a conversation between a human and a god, and Miriam and Ravi had to decide how to stage that in a way that would rise to this level of divinity. She said:
“Our Mahabharata traverses many different forms of storytelling, and part of that is a nod to the fact that this story has been told over so many years in many different ways. To bring all that history with us felt important. There’s a live band on stage with us for part one, there’s dances, there’s Kathakali, there are all sorts of performance styles that you see. In part two we’ve interpreted the Bhagavad Gita as a Baroque opera in Sanskrit. It’s in this ancient language but in this western, very heightened musical style. Performed by an opera singer named Meher Pavri … it is something that every single time I hear it, it takes my breath away.”
Mahabharata. Photo by David Cooper.
After starting out in Toronto, Why Not Theatre took the show to the Barbican in London, and now they are heading to His Majesty’s Theatre in Perth. “We are a Toronto-based company but our work is always meant for an international dialogue. Part of that is the ensemble of actors on our team, all from the south Asian diaspora, but we have folks from Perth, Malaysia, the UK, India, Canada, so we have an international team bringing all those perspectives.”
“What’s awesome about coming to Perth or to London is those diasporas and all those audiences exist in those places. You have the auntie and uncle who grew up with the story and are so excited to see it because they never get to see it on a stage like at His Majesty’s Theatre. And then you have the people in Australia who saw the [Peter] Brook version, and then there are people who are theatre or story lovers who have never heard of it. And there are people who are somewhere in between. … When travelling you get to encounter all those different people with all those different histories of the story.”
“I recommend coming on a marathon day because you get to spend a day with that audience. What starts to happen is you have conversations with people who are sitting around you and in the bathroom and at the meal and those audiences start to mix too. This idea of international is deeper than us touring; it’s a collision of cultures that are always happening in our company but also in our audiences. The opportunity to visit another culture and collide with new people and new ideas is the reason that we do what we do and the reason that it’s so important that we share it. Because maybe somewhere between your culture and my culture there’s something new.”
Mahabharata is showing at His Majesty’s Theatre from the 8th to the 16th February as part of Perth Festival.