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| Peter Brook |
Hi All,
Following my tales about Poland and the theatre director Grotowski on Saturday, I turned my thoughts again to another theatre director hero of mine, Peter Brook.
I wrote about him on post 53B of my Cinderella blog. I was also completing a submission for a commission for an exciting new theatre piece yesterday and the brief asked unusually for examples of three influences on your work.
So inevitably I had to cite Peter Brook. He's a source I frequently return to, his book The Empty Space being a bible of sorts.
Peter Brook has lived and worked in Paris for over 40 years, finding the french temperament more conducive to his way of working. But in early 2011 the 85 year old director who continues to work with huge vision and energy stepped down from his his 36-year tenure at the experimental Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris.
At that time Tom Piper, the Royal Shakespeare Company designer who worked with Brook in the early 1990s said of him "He got a very international audience there and French audiences appreciated it. He is amazingly charismatic and so he gets amazing things out of people."
When Brook announced four years ago that he would gradually step down from the Bouffes, he spoke of a conviction he shared with his young collaborators Poubelle and Mantei that "opera, popular music, theatre and dance can be married in a single spectacle in order to invent new forms".
Brook has produced ground-breaking shows in French, including La Tragedie de Carmen; the epic Indian poem The Mahabharata; and, more recently, Tierno Bokar, a Sufi tale from Mali. Recently Brook, who was born in west London to Russian-Latvian émigrés, admitted he sometimes missed the English language.
He began what many have seen as a creative exile in Paris after enjoying British success in 1970 with RSC productions of Marat/Sadeand the anti-Vietnam play US, and finally with A Midsummer Night's Dream, starring Frances de la Tour and Ben Kingsley.
His guiding principle, regarded as startling at the time, was that the stage should be left uncluttered so the imagination could work. As I mentioned The Empty Space was probably the single most influential book I read at university and to which I regularly return to remind me of the guiding principles I have been so hugely influenced by.
In it he sets out the idea that the audience is central to the atmosphere of a piece. Elaborate sets, according to this theory, just divide the actors from the public.
Brook's revolutionary methods were always fluid, however with decisions never fully final. Tom Piper recalled "When we were rehearsing La Tempête in Paris, we brought a whole load of earth into the theatre for a week before we decided it wasn't right. In the end we went with a patch of sand and a single rock. We had an orange box which became a boat and was then worn on Ariel's head. This became the image on the poster, but it had all come from rehearsal."
Brook's 1963 film of Lord of the Flies is still thought of as a classic, but the poor reception in Britain of a 1978 stage production of Antony and Cleopatra, starring Alan Howard and Glenda Jackson, heralded a long period of work at the dilapidated former variety venue in Paris. Brook's productions only came to Britain intermittently.
Tom Piper also said "The British establishment is difficult for him, It is a shame we have never found the way to get him to come back permanently to Britain. He has become a special event when he comes back and perhaps that helps him to have a bigger impact."
Brook's pared style – with a stripped stage and minimal props – is so pervasive as to be mainstream now, but the director always worked at the Bouffes as if he were struggling in a start-up venture. According to Tom Piper "In my time he ran just a skeleton staff there. If you wanted to take anything anywhere, you had to hire a van. It was like working in a fringe theatre." There is a powerful resonance there for me.
Brook's innovative thinking has been reflected in the shape of the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford. "We have a stage that thrusts out and the audience is wrapped around it. We wanted to put the actor right at the heart of it. It is about preserving the past too, but we wanted to be playful. You have to keep the character and the ghosts of a theatre," said Piper.
Brook does not want his successors at the Bouffes to feel compelled to follow his rules. "The first thing I wanted to establish – having spent all my life fighting against tradition – was to avoid [appointing] a successor who would have to try and prove my line."
BROOK'S TRIUMPHS
1981 La Tragédie de Carmen, after Prosper Mérimée, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy
A radical reworking of the Bizet opera taking it closer to the dark themes of the original novel.1981 La Cerisaie, by Anton Chekhov
A version of The Cherry Orchard in which the faded grandeur of Chekhov's country estate setting has been stripped away from the first.
1985: The Mahabharata
A nine-hour version of the epic Indian poem that was created by Brook for the Avignon festival. It tells of the clash between two warring families and between good and evil.1990 La Tempête, by William Shakespeare, in an adaptation Jean-Claude Carrière
Shakespeare's desert island was represented by a rectangle of sand and a rock. A wooden crate represented the wrecked boat.
Article Source: The Guardian
Header image courtesy Williams, D. ed. (1992) Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge
When Brook announced four years ago that he would gradually step down from the Bouffes, he spoke of a conviction he shared with his young collaborators Poubelle and Mantei that "opera, popular music, theatre and dance can be married in a single spectacle in order to invent new forms".
Brook has produced ground-breaking shows in French, including La Tragedie de Carmen; the epic Indian poem The Mahabharata; and, more recently, Tierno Bokar, a Sufi tale from Mali. Recently Brook, who was born in west London to Russian-Latvian émigrés, admitted he sometimes missed the English language.
He began what many have seen as a creative exile in Paris after enjoying British success in 1970 with RSC productions of Marat/Sadeand the anti-Vietnam play US, and finally with A Midsummer Night's Dream, starring Frances de la Tour and Ben Kingsley.
His guiding principle, regarded as startling at the time, was that the stage should be left uncluttered so the imagination could work. As I mentioned The Empty Space was probably the single most influential book I read at university and to which I regularly return to remind me of the guiding principles I have been so hugely influenced by.
In it he sets out the idea that the audience is central to the atmosphere of a piece. Elaborate sets, according to this theory, just divide the actors from the public.
Brook's revolutionary methods were always fluid, however with decisions never fully final. Tom Piper recalled "When we were rehearsing La Tempête in Paris, we brought a whole load of earth into the theatre for a week before we decided it wasn't right. In the end we went with a patch of sand and a single rock. We had an orange box which became a boat and was then worn on Ariel's head. This became the image on the poster, but it had all come from rehearsal."
Brook's 1963 film of Lord of the Flies is still thought of as a classic, but the poor reception in Britain of a 1978 stage production of Antony and Cleopatra, starring Alan Howard and Glenda Jackson, heralded a long period of work at the dilapidated former variety venue in Paris. Brook's productions only came to Britain intermittently.
Tom Piper also said "The British establishment is difficult for him, It is a shame we have never found the way to get him to come back permanently to Britain. He has become a special event when he comes back and perhaps that helps him to have a bigger impact."
Brook's pared style – with a stripped stage and minimal props – is so pervasive as to be mainstream now, but the director always worked at the Bouffes as if he were struggling in a start-up venture. According to Tom Piper "In my time he ran just a skeleton staff there. If you wanted to take anything anywhere, you had to hire a van. It was like working in a fringe theatre." There is a powerful resonance there for me.
Brook's innovative thinking has been reflected in the shape of the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford. "We have a stage that thrusts out and the audience is wrapped around it. We wanted to put the actor right at the heart of it. It is about preserving the past too, but we wanted to be playful. You have to keep the character and the ghosts of a theatre," said Piper.
Brook does not want his successors at the Bouffes to feel compelled to follow his rules. "The first thing I wanted to establish – having spent all my life fighting against tradition – was to avoid [appointing] a successor who would have to try and prove my line."
BROOK'S TRIUMPHS
1981 La Tragédie de Carmen, after Prosper Mérimée, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy
A radical reworking of the Bizet opera taking it closer to the dark themes of the original novel.1981 La Cerisaie, by Anton Chekhov
A version of The Cherry Orchard in which the faded grandeur of Chekhov's country estate setting has been stripped away from the first.
1985: The Mahabharata
A nine-hour version of the epic Indian poem that was created by Brook for the Avignon festival. It tells of the clash between two warring families and between good and evil.1990 La Tempête, by William Shakespeare, in an adaptation Jean-Claude Carrière
Shakespeare's desert island was represented by a rectangle of sand and a rock. A wooden crate represented the wrecked boat.
Article Source: The Guardian
The Empty Space by Peter Brook is available on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Empty-Space-Penguin-Modern-Classics
I highly recommend a read!
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| Brooke's 1970 RSC production of Midsummer Night's Dream |
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| Peter Brook with Romane Bohringer -rehearsal of The Tempest in 1991 in Avignon. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images |
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