Peter Brook: A Biography

Reviewed by Arnold Aronson
The New York Times
May 25, 2005

Most of theater history belongs to actors and playwrights, but in the 20th century the stage became largely the domain of the director. From Meyerhold and Reinhardt through Chreau and Sellars, visionary and charismatic individuals have brought bold conceptions to theater and opera, reinterpreting classic plays, reinventing approaches to acting and investigating the relationship of the spectator to the stage. In the second half of the 20th century, no director has had more influence or recognition than Peter Brook.

Brook's productions of "King Lear," "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" between 1962 and 1970 galvanized theater audiences and practitioners alike. (In the process, not incidentally, Brook helped cement the reputation of the newly founded Royal Shakespeare Company.)

Gone were romantic and quasi-realistic settings, replaced by austere yet bold scenography that often revealed the mechanics of the stage and created startling visual effects while emphasizing the theatricality inherent in the texts. A highly physical, even acrobatic approach to acting from rigorously trained ensemble casts shifted the emphasis from rhetoric to action.

The productions served to strip away a century's worth of cultural accretions that had, more often than not, turned British Shakespeare into stale exercises. Suddenly, Shakespeare was, in the Polish critic Jan Kott's phrase, our contemporary.

Such innovations were not limited to Shakespeare. Stimulated through contact with the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski and the American director Joseph Chaikin and the writings of the French theater visionary Antonin Artaud, Brook in 1963 created the Theater of Cruelty Workshop within the Royal Shakespeare Company. Its goal was to reinvigorate theater through a theatrical vocabulary not tied to language.

The most notable production to come out of this experiment was the landmark 1964 production "Marat/Sade" by Peter Weiss, in which the actors transformed themselves into the inmates of the mental asylum at Charenton, where they restaged the French Revolution under the guidance of a fellow inmate, the Marquis de Sade. So believable was the acting that audiences were often too stunned and terrified to applaud.

Few of Brook's experiments were, strictly speaking, new; he borrowed freely from the vibrant avant-garde of the time. He was, however, one of the most successful directors since Max Reinhardt in the 1920s at bringing avant-garde approaches in acting and staging to institutional theaters and thus to mainstream audiences. The result was revolutionary; the staging of the classics was forever altered.

Brook, who was born in 1925 in the suburbs of London to Jewish immigrants from Latvia, was attracted to both theater and film from his youth - but on a scale far grander than most. As Michael Kustow, a theater and film producer, writes in his authorized biography, the 10-year-old Peter staged a full-length puppet production of "Hamlet" for his family. Brook received acclaim for his fresh stagings of classics, opera and West End light entertainments, but it was this very eclecticism that allowed Brook to wed the avant-garde with the bourgeois theater.

Following "Dream" in 1970, which toured the world, Brook made a seemingly radical departure, though, as Kustow explains, it was almost inevitable given Brook's disaffection with British theater. Following a path that many 20th-century directors had taken, Brook withdrew from the public stage for three years and created a laboratory to investigate the very nature of theater.

He gathered an international group of actors in Paris that would eventually become the International Center for Theater Creation. The company staged an original ritualistic work with an invented language, "Orghast," for the Shiraz festival in Iran (a controversial event because of its sponsorship by the shah), and then embarked on an extended journey to Africa in an attempt to find a universal language of performance. This was followed by travels around the United States where they worked with the Teatro Campesino in California and visited Indian reservations to observe Native American performance practices.

From 1974 on, however, the output of the company was prodigious. Much of the deceptively simple work that his company created could be classified under Brook's famous category of "holy theater" - one of spiritual intent that seeks to reveal the hidden aspects of life. Often these productions were performed on a nearly bare stage with little more than a few carpets as scenery.

Perhaps influenced by Brook's lifelong fascination with Gurdjieff, the results were often revelatory, provocative, even mystical, as in a stripped-down production of "Carmen," but with the exception of the epic "Mahabharata," none equaled the grandeur or spectacle of Brook's earlier work.

Despite Kustow's access to Brook, there is little in his biography that is not already known. It fills in some details missing from Brook's more elegant memoir, "Threads of Time" (1998), but borrows heavily from familiar published sources.

However, for someone looking to trace Brook's journey from his student "Doctor Faustus" to the current "Tierno Bokar," it provides a useful service.

Arnold Aronson's "Looking Into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography" will be published in July.