“The Prisoner” Makes A Space Of Its Own

The Prisoner, an original production with text and stage direction by Peter Brook and Marie-Héléne Estienne, makes a somewhat belated — and engrossing — debut at Yale Repertory Theatre.

And there’s still time to catch it, as it runs through Nov. 17.

At 93, famed director Peter Brook has an unassailable reputation in theater. His innovative techniques have been an avant-garde inspiration for decades. If you’ve seen any of the productions that Yale Rep sponsors in its No Boundaries series, you’ve seen theater that owes something to Brook. Such work often entails a minimalist approach. There are no grand sets. Unnamed or unspecified characters wear stylized clothing of no particular time or place. The approach also puts storytelling over character development. Comparisons to stories that convey a certain timelessness — from myths to folk tales to Noh plays — are common.

Fascinating, with an underplayed lyrical intensity, The Prisoner comes across as a modernized telling of what could be a sacred text. It employs the age-old device of a stranger or ​“Visitor” (played by Hayley Carmichael, a woman, in a role that was originally an elderly male stand-in for Brook) trying to understand customs to which she is not at home. The incident that inspired the play — Brook, in his travels in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, encountered a man who sat staring at a prison — becomes a kind of koan, enigmatic yet also suggestive of a spiritual idea of atonement rather than a simply punitive one.

Mavuso (Hiran Abeysekera) and his sister Nadia (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) love each other, and when Mavuso finds Nadia in bed with their father, the son kills his sire in a fit of passion. The father’s brother, Ezekiel (Hervé Goffings), initially enacts corporal punishment upon Mavuso in a scene of concentrated violence that feels like a ritual. In his subsequent wanderings Mavuso encounters different figures but eventually returns to his village. Ezekiel confronts him and offers an unusual form of penance: reside in a forest where he will contemplate a prison each day. Mavuso becomes then a sort of prisoner as well as kind of a hermit, or holy man of the mountain.

A tale of fratricide and incest has a certain lurid interest, but also associations gained from Greek tragedy and the allegories favored by the world’s religions. How deeply one wishes to delve into the possible significance of The Prisoner is left to the individual viewer. The play itself — slow, stately and self-possessed in execution — is also powerfully straightforward. Abeysekera plays Mavuso as guileless and open, experiencing everything that happens with a concentrated fatalism. As Nadia, Srinivasan might be as much a principle as a person, both temptation and expiation in one. Other roles, such as Hervé Goffings’ Ezekiel or a Man played by Omar Silva, have the feel of devices for the sake of the story, while Carmichael’s Visitor wins us over with her direct address, someone who is asking more than telling about her experience.

David Violi’s set consists of sticks, dirt, a tree trunk, and, at one point, an actual campfire. The different spaces in the story are suggested by circuitous movements through the open playing space, with the placement of bodies in space a key aspect of the play’s visual effect. Movement conveys much of the feeling generated by the play, and poetic lighting effects by Philippe Vialatte let us feel changes in mood and time of day.

Though for all its portentous trappings, The Prisoner is almost light-hearted at times. There is an encounter between Mavuso and two guards that plays a bit like Hamlet’s famous scene with the gravediggers, or any Shakespearean scene in which comic commoners change the dominant tone. Another comic incident is Mavuso’s attempt to tame a rat he finds in the forest, which ends with what may be a nod to Aesop’s fable about the frog and the scorpion.

In a sense, the generating event at the heart of the play is a kind of absence. When the Visitor, as she was directed to do by Ezekiel, encounters Mavuso, he has nothing to say to her directly. Years later, she returns to find him again and arrives at an insight of sorts. As with many seekers perplexed by an encounter with a sage, the Visitor’s meditative commentary becomes a parable, a way of putting us in the Visitor’s place, faced with a task that defeats itself in its achievement.

Brook, Estienne, and company captivate the viewer with theater as an essence of action, reactions and gestures, a dream world where events suggest an exorable logic and meaning requires an intuitive response. With the theater season in Connecticut currently offering heated stories of dysfunctional grappling with contemporary social issues, The Prisoner inhabits a refreshing space all its own.

The Prisoner runs now through Nov. 17 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St. Click here for tickets and more information.