Mahabharata at Sadler's Wells. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Within the traditional hierarchies of British theatre, dance still gets relegated to the bottom of the heap with depressing frequency. The new Mahabharata, directed by Stuart Wood, advertises itself as a combination of dance, music and drama; with equal billing going to Nitin Sawhney for music, Stephen Clark for text and Gauri Sharma Tripathi for choreography. During the first half of the show the three are equally balanced. In fact, Tripathi's movement is arguably the best thing in it, her contemporary inflected Kathak driving the group scenes, her fluent vocabulary of gestures animating the drama, her deftly orchestrated tableaux creating moments of powerful, symbolic impact.
In the second half, however, Tripathi appears to have been paid off. Every opportunity for her to give the action some much-needed energy and physical drama is squandered. The pivotal dice-playing scene is inert, the cast pretty much rooted to the spot even as they watch the lives of the Pandava brothers being gambled into ruins. The final battle scene barely moves. It seems that as soon as this production delves deeper into issues of character, morality and fate, dance is sidelined in order for the text to take over the task. Never mind that Stephen Clark's dialogue and lyrics are inadequate, and that the action turns heavy and long-winded. In this literary dominant culture of ours, dance and dancers are too easily assumed to be dispensable decoration, never the production's dramatic heart.
