Michael Kustow

Michael Kustow is Commissioning Editor Arts for Channel Four Television. He has run the Institute of Contemporary Arts, worked with Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Sixties, and has been an Associate Director of the National Theatre. His books include The Book of ‘US’, an account of Peter Brook’s Vietnam War show.

An egg-shaped space, one half-shell a bank of raked seating, the other a high wall of splintered striated rock, roofed by the sky and stars that Van Gogh saw haloed from Arles. You look down into a bowl of sand dented by a strip of water and a shallow pool. On a boulder behind you a robed musician raises a twisted horn and sounds an earthy fanfare, like an elephant cry. At nightfall in this quarry a few kilometres outside Avignon, Peter Brook’s staging of Jean-Claude Carrière’s adaptation of The Mahabharata begins.

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences