The Guardian

Shakespearean and shamanistic

A master of the visual and the verbal who redefined the stage

Mark Lawson

The two key British theatre directors of the middle decades of the 20th century were near-contemporaries and close friends called Peter. But while Peter Hall was instrumental in setting up and running the biggest theatres – first the Royal Shakespeare Company and then the National Theatre – Peter Brook set himself up to run away from them. He spent the last five decades of his career at a theatre of his own in Paris, where he worked on long and idiosyncratic projects that would come to the UK only as a date on a world tour.

But, despite this long absence, which he disliked being described as an exile, Brook’s impact on the theatre of his home country was huge. Directors, especially of the classics, are often at their best with either the visual or the verbal aspects of theatre, but Brook was brilliant at both.

His two key Shakespearean productions in England placed the most musically nuanced speakers of their generations – Paul Scofield and Alan Howard

– in stagings of King Lear (1962) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970). The productions were chromatic opposites: the tragedy looked dark, bleak, doomy (Brook rejected Technicolor for his 1971 movie version) while the comedy, staged on a set of circus trapezes, was bright, white, light.

Generations of younger directors learned from Brook the possibility of respecting the poetry while ignoring the stage directions, to create an experience that somehow simultaneously has both nothing and everything to do with Shakespeare. These achievements were usefully encapsulated in a short but thought-packed book, The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare (2013), which characteristically combined practical stagecraft with literary and psychological insights.

Brook’s lasting effect on theatre has been even greater through his 1968 book The Empty Space, which remains in print and much-studied. It challenged the postwar British fashion for building massive drama factories with multiple stages.

In the book Brook discusses four types of theatrical performance that he categorises as “deadly”, “holy”, “rough” and “immediate”. Deadliness encompassed most of the commercial theatre and the stuffier productions in subsidised houses while holiness represented the potential of the best theatre to achieve transcendence.

Roughness encouraged the absence, in some circumstances, of elaborate preparations and props; the director had been much affected by an improvised theatrical performance after the second world war in the bombed ruins of the Hamburg Opera House.

Immediacy was a more elusive concept, bringing together tradition and innovation, but it has been interpreted as another argument against being bounded by a building. The preference among directors such as Michael Grandage and Kenneth Branagh for temporary residences or pop-up venues reflects Brook’s vision.

Although Brook had regular premises in Paris – the Bouffes du Nord – he used this base for theatrical explorations without borders which he hoped to then take around the globe. The Mahabharata, on which Brook worked with his frequent collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, sought to achieve a universal comprehensibility through image and gesture. The same aim led to The Conference of the Birds, based on a 12th-century Persian poem, and Tierno Bokar, a bio-drama about a Malian Sufi.

Brook’s interest in living dramatists of his own nationality was more or less limited to a production of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away. One of his most successful later stage productions was an adaptation of Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and he made an impressive film version of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1963).

For him, the key modern dramatists were the Irish-French Samuel Beckett and the French Antonin Artaud. The “theatre of cruelty” promoted by Artaud shaped two pieces of new writing on which Brook worked: Marat/ Sade (1964), by the German Peter Weiss, and US (1966), an improvised anti-Vietnam play.

Brook remained a guru for directors who had stayed on the other side of the Channel, wrestling with English tastes and funding. The published diaries of Hall and Richard Eyre, describing their years running the National Theatre, both featured entries in which they travelled to Paris to discuss difficulties with Brook.

Some other directors felt Brook had failed to do his duty to arts in the UK. Brook was bemused by this, convinced that he had left the British artistic directorships to people better equipped to do them. Another criticism was that the leisurely rehearsals and messianic receptions in France sometimes edged his work towards pretension and self-indulgence. There were two sides of Brook’s creative personality – Shakespearean and shamanistic – and doubters tended to prefer the former to the latter.

Brook’s final works continued to reflect this dichotomy. The Quality of Mercy was a brilliant compression of a lifetime’s insights into England’s greatest playwright. Brook also wrote about the power of words in Tip of the Tongue (2017), and about the uses of music in Playing by Ear (2019).

However, his last stage productions in his home country – both co-directed with Marie-Hélène Estienne – suggested that Brook’s non-Shakespearean theatre was now better in theory than practice.

The Prisoner was a meditation on crime and punishment that contained some thrilling ideas and images. But, tellingly, a scene featuring a real fire but an imagined rat hinted that Brook’s imagination was now butting up against stricter theatrical safety regulations.

Similarly, in The Valley of Astonishment, a piece about synaesthesia seen at the Young Vic in 2014, a key moment was described, rather than shown, because it was not actable.

To launch Playing by Ear, Brook, in late October 2019, defied failing sight and physical frailty to enthral a National Theatre audience with 45 minutes of brainy but playful thoughts on the performing arts.

The next month, he was given a lifetime achievement award at the Evening Standard theatre awards but, hospitalised in Paris after a fall, was unable to travel. His daughter Irina received the trophy, and a grateful ovation, on his behalf.

Histories of 20th-century British theatre will contain numerous references to the two Peters. Hall’s immense achievement was to create the cultural cathedrals in Stratford and London, and make UK culture unthinkable without them. Brook, though, had greater influence on the imaginations of the directors who work inside those buildings and, following another of his examples, increasingly outside them.

National

en-gb

2022-07-04T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-07-04T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://guardian.pressreader.com/article/281715503314463

Guardian/Observer