Truth as a crescent moon
Rowena Loverance reviews Peter Brock's new play, 11 and 12
I took part in a master class the other day. Me and about a thousand others. In a packed auditorium, we practised the sound of one hand clapping. We pointed our right hand at the stage and concentrated on being fully present in the exact point and moment. We clenched our hand into a fist, made to throw it at the stage and then sat back in our seats. Feeling and letting go. The master in question was the theatre director Peter Brook, and we were the post-show audience of his new play 11 and 12, itself a reworking, as Brook loves to do, of an earlier version, Tierno Bokar, shown in the UK (in French) in 2005. Set in French Sudan, modern Mali, it tells the true story of a dispute within a Muslim Sufi order over how many times one particular prayer should be recited. As the row escalated, exacerbated by the interventions of colonial officials, it led to intercommunal violence and the eventual deaths of both protagonists, Shaykh Hamallah in exile in Vichy France and Tierno Bokar in abandoned isolation.
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