The soul of Peter Brook’s work as a director, actor and writer was in his productions noted for what he called “colour-rich”, as opposed to “colour-blind”, casting. In his view, when the audience sits bored, listening to a recital of words with no emotion, the actor has failed.
Brook once said: “People have entrusted themselves to you for two hours or more and you have to give them a respect that derives from confidence in what you are doing. At the end of an evening, you may have encouraged what is crude, violent or destructive in them. Or you can help them. By that I mean that an audience can be touched, entranced or – best of all – moved to a silence that vibrates round the theatre.”
And this, literally, brought the roof down on the opening night of William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the once-dilapidated Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris that he helped restore. The applause shook the building.
In a 2017 interview with British art critic Michael Billingron, Brook spoke about how important it is to “swim against the tide and achieve whatever we can in our chosen field. Fate dictated that mine was that of theatre and, within that, I have a responsibility to be as positive and creative as I can. To give way to despair is the ultimate cop-out.”
Not surprisingly, after his productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the Bouffes du Nord, his base for more than 30 years was in African villages where his actors improvised performances, and on stages both grand and in modes that his globetrotting ensemble visited refined the way theatre is looked at.
Brook’s landmark achievements include a nine-hour version of the ‘Mahabharata’, putting Shakespeare on trapezes, and directing the likes of Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud and Paul Scofield at the RSC.
‘The Mahabharata’, in fact, was staged in a French quarry in 1985 and The New York Times, noting its “overwhelming critical acclaim”, said it “did nothing less than attempt to transform the Hindu myth into universalised art, accessible to any culture”.
Many post-colonial scholars, however, have challenged this claim to universalism, accusing the play of Orientalism. Author Gautam Dasgupta wrote: “Brook’s Mahabharata falls short of essential Indianness of the epic by staging predominantly its major incidents and failing to adequately emphasise its coterminous philosophical precepts.”
Brook returned to the epic in 2016 with ‘Battlefield’, staged with his long-time collaborator Marie-Helene Estienne.
Brook also directed musicals, the anti-Vietnam war protest play US, and co-created with British author Ted Hughes Orghast, an experimental play based on the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, a Titan and god of fire.
“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged,” Brook wrote in The Empty Space (1968), which many directors and actors consider their Bible.
Often referred to as “our greatest living theatre director”, Brook won multiple Tony and Emmy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, the Japanese Praemium Imperiale and the Prix Italia. The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri in 2021 “for his valuable contributions towards art”.
Born in London on March 21, 1925, at age seven he acted out a four-hour version of Hamlet on his own for his parents.
Several of his shows received Broadway transfers, including the avant garde Marat/Sade, which won the Tony award for best play in 1964.
In 1970, Brook moved to Paris, where he set up his International Centre for Theatre Research. The company visited Africa, where his actors gave performances that “didn’t use anything that corresponded to the theatre of the time — we wanted to play to audiences who were not conditioned by anything. We wouldn’t, even experimentally, do a play with a text or a theme or a name.”
Brook married actor Natasha Parry in 1951 and they had two children, Irina (now a director) and Simon (now a producer). Parry died in 2015. (IANS)
