Gardner Arts Centre, Sussex University, Falmer, Until Saturday 22 May

"Today, it's impossible to pretend that we are not in an age when the destruction of the world exists incessantly around us.

"It's not up to me to suddenly point out to people that the world is in danger. It's all too obvious. Today, nobody can do a thing to stop or influence the course of events or change an immense movement that's sweeping the world."

It was into this climate that controversial director Peter Brook unleashed his nine-hour stage (and later screen) presentation of Indian epic The Mahabharata - a 5,000-year-old Sanskrit text eight times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, 15 times that of The Bible and 30 times longer than Paradise Lost.

Proving that the man renowned as the modern stage's greatest innovator truly was dauntless, it went down as one of the major events in the history of live performance.

That was 1985. 19 years later, with many fearing that the world is again on the verge of destruction, Brook has chosen to delve once more into the heart of Hinduism's primary text, hoping to unearth its archetypal wisdom and human insight for a new generation.

This time, those with impatient buttocks will be glad to hear, he has honed down the search, concentrating on an excerpt from the 18th and final volume of The Mahabharata.

Born storyteller Maurice Benichou, whose acting credits include the spellbinding French film Amelie, will relate the death of India's most popular and venerated god, killed by a simple hunter's arrow after he descends to Earth to broker peace between warring factions.

It is a timeless treatise on philosophy and religion, packed with goodies and baddies but within which excessive virtue can be just as evil as excessive vice.

"We are seeking for what gives a form of culture its life," says Brook. "Not studying the culture itself but what is behind it. The actor must try to step back from his own culture and, above all, from its stereotypes."

In Brook's The Mahabharata, the hordes of armies and battling elephants of which the text speaks were nowhere to be seen on stage.

While Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson might have called this a missed opportunity, fans insisted that the mythic language, characters and narrative structure were thereby thrown into bolder relief.

Performed in an empty space and accompanied only by a solo musician, La Mort De Krishna, which gets its UK premiere tonight, looks set to continue the crusade for theatre as communal experience rather than free-standing spectacle.

Having spellbound audiences for more than 50 years, the one-time British enfant terrible clearly still holds true to the famous opening sentences of his revolutionary Sixties autobiography: "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, while someone else is watching him and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged."

Performed in French with English surtitles
Gardner Arts Centre, 8pm, £16/£14, 01273 709709