The set is not a million miles from Druid Theatre’s Waiting for Godot that was on this stage earlier in the month. Put together by David Violi, it’s a desolate landscape of sun-scorched wood and the odd rock, a dry and forbidding wasteland. But Samuel Beckett’s minimalist classic is an action-packed romp compared with the gnomic contemplation of this 80-minute piece of soul-searching by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne. There’s more chance of Godot turning up than of getting to the bottom of The Prisoner’s inscrutable conundrum.
Inspired by an observation by Brook in his days as a global wanderer in search of theatrical truth, it’s the story of Mavuso who has murdered his father for having an incestuous relationship with his sister. The young man’s punishment is uncommonly trying. Instead of confinement, his 20-year sentence is to sit in the desert gazing upon a prison from the outside. The ease with which he could turn on his heels and leave (and there’s a steady procession of passers-by who would help him do so) is what makes his challenge so excruciating. Accepting his guilt, Mavuso, played with grace and stoicism by Hiran Abeysekera, wants to be purged.
You can imagine why Brook found it remarkable that a man should sit stock still outside a prison. It seems like a violation. Who would accept imprisonment without being imprisoned? What motivation could drive you to suffer more than society asked of you? In this telling, Hervé Goffings as Ezechiel, Mavuso’s uncle, has a commanding moral authority that influences the younger man, but you don’t get the impression he needs much persuading. Mavuso readily accepts the forfeit as the only way to “repair” himself.
But although philosophically provocative, a man spending two decades on a barren plain is dramatically inert. Waiting for Godot does at least offer the promise of a revelation, the pretence of time passing for a purpose, whereas The Prisoner commits to nothing more specific than a mystical search for “something else” in a country where a “rough brown magic” prevails. The clarity and control that characterised Brook’s best work on texts with the richness of The Mahabharata and The Tempest is only a few short steps from banality when the material is this thin.
The Prisoner is at its most interesting when we see how Mavuso’s gesture upsets the conventional order. He’s not in anyone’s way, yet he is joined one night by two prison guards who are disturbed by his presence and would be happier if he left. How to deal with a man who is not so much breaking the law as obeying it too well? “You’re undermining the whole system,” they tell him, a feeling shared by the kindly local villager who befriends him (Omar Silva) and Mavuso’s estranged sister, Nadia (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), to whom he is also sexually attracted (the play’s sexual politics are vexing).
But for as long as the focus is on this voluntary prisoner and his long wait in the hope of enlightenment, the consternation he causes seems secondary. To deal with a story that is more meditative than dramatic, Brook and Estienne treat it like a fairy tale, their language direct and unadorned. They give it the archetypal quality of a parable, but not the profundity it seems to be searching for.
• At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 26 August. And the National Theatre, London, 12 September to 4 October.
