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Peter Brook

Introduction

Peter Brook has been a towering figure in world theatre in the second half of the twentieth
century and into the twenty-first. He was born in 1925, the son of Jewish emigrées from
Latvia and, as he found out later, cousin of the Russian theatre director, Valentin Pluchek.
He went to Westminster School and Oxford University where he directed an admired
production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. At the age of twenty Brook directed King John for
Birmingham Rep, and the following year was invited to Stratford to stage Love’s Labours
Lost. He dutifully planned the production, especially the first scene, with cardboard cutout
figures on a model stage, but when the actors came to try to realize his scheme, it was a
disaster – lifeless, boring and wrong. ‘I think, looking back’, he wrote in The Empty Space,
‘that my whole future work hung in the balance. I stopped, and walked away from my book,
in amongst the actors, and I have never looked at a written plan since’.

History

Brook’s rise was irresistible. From 1947 to 1950 he was Director of Productions at the Royal
Opera House, Covent Garden, where he staged, among other operas, a controversial
Salomé with settings by Salvador Dali. He followed this through the 1950s with a wide
variety of productions, including Jean Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon in 1950, which
seemed to embody the spirit of the time, Laurence Olivier as Titus Andronicus in a brilliant
revival of this almost-forgotten play, and the deft French musical, Irma la Douce. In 1951, he
married the actress Natasha Parry, a union that lasted for over sixty years.

He joined Peter Hall and Michel Saint-Denis as a director of the new Royal Shakespeare
Company in 1962, and created some of the most memorable productions of the company’s
first decade – King Lear, The Marat/Sade, US and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His
Shakespeare productions created a new perception of Shakespeare, freeing the plays from
Romantic moral schema and problematizing the notions of good and bad, heroic and
cowardly, even tragedy and comedy.

Early in 1964 he was given carte blanche to work with a chosen group of actors in what
became known as the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season. Working with Charles Marowitz, Brook
explored some of Antonin Artaud’s ideas through free improvisation and work on texts as
varied as Artaud’s own A Spurt of Blood, John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy’s Ars Longa
Vita Brevis and Hamlet, taken apart and re-made as a collage. He was, he said, not trying
to reconstruct Artaud; rather, he wanted, through the performer’s presence, to make visible
the invisible. Brook’s seminal 1968 book, The Empty Space, examined some of this.

In 1970, with Micheline Rozan, Brook founded Le Centre International de Recherche

Théâtrale (C.I.R.T.) in Paris, where he was subsidized by a number of foundations to conduct
experimental work with an international group of actors. The initial plan was for three
works, the first Orghast, commissioned by Iran and performed in the open air at Shiraz over
the twelve hours to dawn. Treating a version of the Promethean myth in a non-existent
language devised largely by the poet Ted Hughes, it was ceremonial, operatic and strange,
and The Financial Times suggested that ‘the playgoer who entered deeply into Orghast
passed through fire, and can never be the same again’. After a period recuperating in Paris,

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the group set out in December 1972 for Africa, to villages and towns with no theatre or
theatrical tradition. A carpet was laid down, people gathered round and the performers
improvised, often through clowning and slapstick. The third experiment was The Conference
of the Birds. The group’s journey across America from California to the Brooklyn Academy
of Music in New York mirrored the ancient mythical journey of the birds in search of
‘Simargh’, a sort of Golden Fleece or Holy Grail.

In 1981 Brook discovered a derelict nineteenth century theatre at the Bouffes du Nord, Paris.
It was renovated to make an empty space surrounded by benches and balconies, and
became home to the new Centre International de Créations Théàtrales (C.I.C.T.).
Productions were mounted here, tours to working class districts of Paris and others world-
wide began here, and audience and performers were able to mingle before the show
began. The first C.I.C.T. production, Timon of Athens, in 1974, won the prize for performance
of the year, and among later works were The Iks, a stark portrayal of a tribe on the edge of
extinction, part warning, part lament, Ubu aux Bouffes, Brook’s finest ‘rough theatre’
production, a stunning Cherry Orchard, and a stripped-down Tragedy of Carmen, which
made enough money on a world tour to finance the most significant project of all, The
Mahabharata.

The twelve-hour Mahabharata was a dramatisation of India’s longest and most beloved
epic. Like its source, it interwove stories that reverberated around dharma, the Hindu notion
of the way to go in life. The narrator, Vyasa, explains simply: ‘One should always listen to
stories. It’s enjoyable, and sometimes it makes things better’. The acting space was set
between a pool at the front of the stage and a stream running along the back, and the
performance was created by the non-hierarchical international group which Brook had
assembled and trained. The production was the ultimate justification and climax of all his
work to date.

And much work sprang from it, too much to detail here. Some highlights were: The Man Who
about memory loss and Tourette’s syndrome, Qui Est Là which explored theatre itself and
its masters through scenes from Hamlet, which was, wrote one critic, ‘spare, economical
and illuminating: a meditation not just on Shakespeare and the mystery of theatre, but on
life, death and the transforming power of the imagination’, Samuel Beckett’s Oh! Les Beaux
Jours with Natasha Parry as Winnie, Hamlet with a cast of only eight actors, with Adrian
Lester as Hamlet, Tierno Bokar about a Mali Sufi and his message of religious toleration,
Love Is My Sin based on Shakespeare’s sonnets, The Valley of Astonishment about the way
our senses work, and The Battlefield, with four actors, set after the Mahabharata’s Battle of
Kurukshetra and staged in the wake not only of the 2015 Paris attacks but also of the death
of Brook’s wife, Natasha Parry.

Aims

In The Empty Space, Peter Brook rejected what he called ‘Deadly Theatre’, the artificial and
superficial, and advocated ‘Immediate Theatre’, which sought the universal in the ordinary.
But he was aware that such abstractions were dangerous. ‘In the theatre’, he remarked in
2007, ‘if you are universal, you risk being bland, and if you are specific you risk being too
narrow ... The trick is to bring in the human specifics without losing what makes it more than
specific’.

‘Immediate theatre’ happens in the present, which makes it not only ‘more real than the
normal stream of consciousness’ but also disturbing. It may be found, he argued, in ‘Holy
Theatre’, ‘performed with beauty and with love, (that) fires the spirit and gives a reminder
that daily drabness is not necessarily all’, and in ‘Rough Theatre’, whose ‘arsenal is
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limitless: the aside, the placard, the topical reference, the local jokes, the exploiting of
accidents, the songs, the dances, the tempo, the noise, the relying on contrasts, the
shorthand of exaggeration, the false noses, the stock types, the stuffed bellies.’ Both forms
hover between imagination and truth, snagging notions of ‘truth’, and opening up the
imagination.

The aim is to represent on the stage what Lear calls ‘the mystery of things’ with
Shakespearean richness. ‘Our aim is not a new Mass, but a new Elizabethan relationship –
linking the private and the public, the intimate and the crowded, the secret and the open,
the vulgar and the magical’. The theatre event was to be the meeting-point between
different levels of reality.

He took whatever he liked, magpie-like, from wherever he found it – Antonin Artaud, Indian
mythology, scientific research, Shakespeare, Brecht, Grotowski. But he never took
indiscriminately. He knew that ‘Artaud applied is Artaud betrayed’. If Samuel Beckett
inspired his King Lear, or Meyerhold his Midsummer Night’s Dream, these productions
remained unequivocally Shakespearean. Marat was Brecht-like, Sade Artaud-like, but The
Marat/Sade was purely Brook’s.

The key was the empty space, ‘which makes it possible for new phenomena to come to life’.
Scenery, costumes and all the paraphernalia of the theatre are ultimately limiting. ‘No fresh
and new experience is possible if there isn’t a pure, virgin space ready to receive it’. Brook’s
influence can be felt in the uncluttered, non-representational stages and the contemporary
architectural configurations of the best twenty-first century theatres. ‘We must show there is
nothing up our sleeves’, he wrote. The empty space is shared by all. It frees the actors’ and
the audience’s imaginations.

The search was for a living international language of theatre, which Brook’s group would
explore and test. Each member brought their own experience and outlook, and then played
– like children play – to discover. Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was about, among
other things, the liberating joy of play. It justified his apparently gnomic statement: ‘A play is
play’.

Practical Application

Peter Brook’s oeuvre is huge, but it is organic. His concerns have lasted, he has worked and
re-worked his material, but his basic position has always been that ‘there are no recipes’.
The work starts from this, constantly evolves and constantly returns to the very basics.

What is the least the actor needs? Freedom to create, but discipline within the form. A basic
exercise for freedom and discipline was the counting game. Actors in a circle count rapidly
in turn: one, two, three ... to twenty. Then they are asked to count at random, not in turn.
Anyone may say the next number. If two actors speak at the same time, the game re-starts.
Can the group reach twenty, smoothly and without any two actors speaking
simultaneously? Each actor has the freedom to choose when to speak, but must comply
with the discipline of not speaking when another speaks and not leaving a pause before
speaking. From this derives not only a sense of the group, but also a feeling for form. The
virtual is made manifest, the spirit assumes body.

Rehearsing a play begins with a read-through, with the actors sitting on cushions in a ring.
Brook requires a simple reading with no attempt at ‘acting’. The first reading is also the first
listening. The first day of rehearsals involves not only reading, but also talking, looking at
pictures or models, playing games, marching round the stage together. Such activities start
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a process which from the second day becomes increasingly supportive for the actor and
allows the imagination to replace natural inhibitions. Early rehearsals include plenty of
exercises and improvisations, first to explore and then inhabit the role, then to create trust
among the group. An actor is asked to describe a picture by Hieronymous Bosch purely in
sounds. Actors become snakes, with their whole bodies or one finger or an arm writhing or
creeping. Edmund in King Lear plays a Franciscan friar to whom Edgar comes to confess.

The day’s programme usually begins with a series of exercises, and might include work with
sticks, tossing them to and from, using them as weapons, lunging with warlike cries, or
swaying them gently in the imaginary breeze, the ‘mirror game’, where one actor tries
exactly to mirror the movements of the partner, breathing exercises or acrobatics. It
probably ends with Tai Chi. More conventional rehearsals follow what Grotowski called the
‘via negativa’, that is, what is unnecessary or inappropriate is discarded. Colin Blakeley,
Creon in Oedipus, recalled that Brook ‘obviously had his own concept, but we were allowed
to experiment. In fact, he said he would tell us nothing but would only tell us what not to
do’. Much of this revolves around the actor’s dual problem – to avoid caricature and
naturalism.

Brook also encouraged actors to manipulate props, like the sticks mentioned above, and
this carried through into performance, as in Ubu aux Bouffes when a shaggy rug became a
bear, a bedspread, the king’s coronation robe. Masks were explored as actors became birds
in The Conference of Birds.

Brook never told an actor how to say a line or where to move, he established the conditions
for the actor to bring the role into being while ensuring the play as a whole remained
coherent. ‘The director is there to attack and yield, provoke and withdraw until the
indefinable stuff begins to flow’, he wrote in The Empty Space. Brook was, however,
capable of inventing stunning moments of theatre, like Oedipus’s blindness revealed when
John Gielgud donned a pair of dark glasses, or when Ubu threw up a handful of confetti
and chattered his teeth to indicate a snaowstorm, or when Krishna slowly took Arjuna’s
arrow from his bow towards Bhishma’s heart in The Mahabharata.

The performance in Brook’s theatre was a ritual in a materialistic world, his works were
fables of healing and reconciliation, derived equally from ancient myth or modern science.
And he never forgot that this ritual was entered through the stage door and through the
foyer.

Further Reading

Brook, Peter, The Empty Space, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 and subsequent editions.
(Brook’s own exposition of the forms of contemporary theatre)

Kustow, Michael, Peter Brook: a Biography, London: Bloomsbury, 2005

Williams, David, Peter Brook: a Theatrical Casebook, London: Methuen, 1992 (An
illuminating and exhaustive collection of reports and views of Brook’s huge range of work
between 1962 and 1990)

W ebsites

https://www.bouffesdunord?en?about_us/peterbrook
http://www.newspeterbrook.com/cirt/
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Film

Peter Brook made a number of original films, and also several of his productions were
filmed. Specially recommended is The Mahabharata, shortened to something over five
hours, made for Channel 4 and available from BFI.