Peter Brook

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Peter Brooke

Born Peter Stephen Paul Brook
March 21, 1925 (1925-03-21) (age 83)
Chiswick, west London
Occupation Director

Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH, CBE (born 21 March 1925) is a British theatre and film director and innovator.

Contents

[edit] Life

Born in Chiswick, west London, the second son of Simon and Ida Brook, and educated at Westminster School, Gresham's School, Holt, and Magdalen College, Oxford.

While at Gresham's he took part in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, and while at Oxford The Infernal Machine. In 1945–1946, he worked at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on productions of Man and Superman, King John, and The Lady from the Sea. In 1946, his first London production was Vicious Circle. In 1947, he went to Stratford-upon-Avon as assistant director on Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost. From 1947 to 1950, he was Director of Productions at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. A proliferation of stage and screen work as producer and director followed.

In 1951, Brook married the actress Natasha Parry, and they have one son and one daughter.

In 1970, with Micheline Rozan, Brook founded the International Centre for Theatre Research, a multinational company of actors, dancers, musicians and others which travelled widely in the Middle East and Africa in the early 1970s. It is now based in Paris at the Bouffes du Nord theatre.[1] You can hear a recording of his voice on TheatreVoice.

[edit] Influences

His work is inspired by the theories of experimental theatre of Jerzy Grotowski, Bertolt Brecht, Meyerhold, G. I. Gurdjieff and the works of Edward Gordon Craig and Stuart Davis.[citation needed]

Brook was influenced by the work of Antonin Artaud and his ideas for a Theatre of Cruelty.

In England, at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz undertook The Theatre of Cruelty Season in 1964, aiming to explore ways in which Artaud's ideas could be used to find new forms of expression and retrain the performer. The result was a showing of 'works in progress' made up of improvisations and sketches, one of which was the premier of Artaud's The Spurt of Blood

[edit] The Empty Space

Peter Brook's book The Empty Space was a highly influential piece of work. It consists of 4 parts, each describing a version of the notion and nature of theatre. Each section is an adaptation of a speech he gave at various Universities. For this reason this book has an accessible, fluid tone.

The opening couple of sentences are extremely widely quoted:

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 I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.

This quote has become something of a mantra for practitioners of site-specific theatre, and also for those working with devising.

The Empty Space strips theatre down to the bare bones of what performance is, rejecting the necessity for traditional theatre spaces, elements or forms in themselves, and placed a huge emphasis on the direct relationship between actor and audience. These ideas are shared with Jerzy Grotowski.

[edit] The Mahabharata

In the mid 1970s,[2] Brook, with writer Jean-Claude Carrière, began work on adapting the Indian epic poem the Mahabharata into a stage play which was first performed in 1985[3] and then later into a televised mini series. The production using an international cast caused heated intercultural debate. Negative criticism came from Indian scholar Pradip Bhattacharya who felt that Brook's interpretation "was not a portrayal of a titanic clash between the forces of good and evil, which is the stuff of the epic... [but] the story of the warring progeny of some rustic landlord".[4]

[edit] Tierno Bokar

In 2005 Brook directed Tierno Bokar, based on the life of the Malian sufi of the same name. The play was adapted for the stage by Marie-Helene Estienne from a book by Amadou Hampate Ba (translated into English under A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar). The book and play detail Bokar's life and message of religious tolerance. Columbia University produced 44 related events, lectures, and workshops that were attended by over 3,200 people throughout the run of Tierno Bokar. Panel discussions focused on topics of religious tolerance and Muslim tradition in West Africa.[5]

[edit] Major productions for the RSC

[edit] Other major productions

[edit] Films

[edit] Awards

[edit] Honours

[edit] Books

  • Brook, Peter (1968). The Empty Space. 
  • Brook, Peter (1988). The Shifting Point. UK: Methuen Drama. ISBN 0-4136-1280-5. 
  • Brook, Peter (1991). Le Diable c'est l'ennui. 
  • Brook, Peter (1993). There Are No Secrets. 
  • Brook, Peter (1995). The Open Door. 
  • Brook, Peter (1998). Threads of Time: Recollections. 
  • Brook, Peter (1999). Evoking Shakespeare. 

[edit] References

  1. ^ Chambers, Colin The Continuum Companion To Twentieth Century Theatre (Continuum, 2002, ISBN 0-8264-4959-X) p. 384
  2. ^ Morgenstern, Joe. "Jean-Claude Carriere; the Mahabharata, the great history of mankind - interview about the stage adaptation", New York Times, April 17 1988. Retrieved on 2007-10-06. 
  3. ^ Carriere, Jean-Claude. "Jean-Claude Carriere; the Mahabharata, the great history of mankind - interview about the stage adaptation", September 1989. Retrieved on 2007-10-06. 
  4. ^ Bhattacharya, Pradip. "Negative Criticism", November 2004. Retrieved on 2007-10-06. 
  5. ^ Columbia University, "Record of Events", [1]
  6. ^ Tony Awards. Retrieved on 2008-02-13.
  • Peter Brook, Threads of Time (1998)
  • Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice (Greenwich Exchange: London, 2007) Contains practical exercises on Artaud drawn from Brook's Theatre of Cruelty Season at the RSC. ISBN 978-1-871551-98-3
  • John Heilpern, Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa, Faber Book Services, 1977, ISBN 0571103723
  • Dale Moffitt, Between Two Silences: Talking with Peter Brook (1999)
  • Biographies by J. C. Trewin (1971) and A. Hunt and G. Reeves (1995) and Michael Kustow (2005)
  • Andrew Todd and Jean-Guy Lecat, The Open Circle: Peter Brook's Theatre Environments (2003)
  • Ouriel Zohar, Meetings with Peter Brook, Zohar, Tel-Aviv 176 p. (1990) (He).

[edit] External links


v • d • e
Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play

Elia Kazan (1947) · Joshua Logan (1948) · Elia Kazan (1949) · Joshua Logan (1950) · George S. Kaufman (1951) · José Ferrer (1952) · Joshua Logan (1953) · Alfred Lunt (1954) · Robert Montgomery (1955) · Tyrone Guthrie (1956) · Moss Hart (1957) · Vincent J. Donehue (1958) · Elia Kazan (1959) · Arthur Penn (1960) · John Gielgud (1961) · Noel Willman (1962) · Alan Schneider (1963) · Mike Nichols (1964) · Mike Nichols (1965) · Peter Brook (1966) · Peter Hall (1967) · Mike Nichols (1968) · Peter Dews (1969) · Joseph Hardy (1970) · Peter Brook (1971) · Mike Nichols (1972) · A. J. Antoon (1973) · José Quintero (1974) · John Dexter (1975)