RIP to the legendary theatre director (and more, but that’s primarily what he’s known for) Peter Brook, whose illustrious career earned him the right to be called a visionary. You’ll hear it a lot. He was also one of the most influential directors of all time. Generations have learned from him, found inspiration in his work, his visions, his bold-ness. NPR has a good overall obituary.
He helmed so many groundbreaking and famous productions. He brought Marat/Sade to England, directing the first production of it there. His Shakespeare productions were talked about far and wide, often the hottest ticket on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as continental Europe. He brought his adaptation of Mahabarata to New York, and it caused a tremendous stir (positive and negative: this was not a new response to his work. He was so far “out there” he often went up against conservative pushback. Not conservative politically, but artistically.) He also directed film and television, and was an author. He was 97 when he died, so there is a lot to discuss.
Let’s start with the most important of his productions: his famous Midsummer Nights Dream, produced in 1970 at the Royal Shakespeare Company before moving to the West End. There is no recording of it, so we have to just take the word of people who saw it. The few photos we have are striking: the set was a white box, with no adornments: a white clear pure space. His motif was the circus, and he had clowns and gymnasts, as well as a series of trapezes dangling over the stage where actors would swing, or slump, or stand on. These images have traveled through the decades. Actors know about it. Or they should. People who saw it still talk about it 50 years later. There are very few productions like that. Theatre is here today, gone tomorrow, unless it is captured on film. There was Orson Welles’ Julius Caesar, with its set and costumes reflecting the rise of fascism in Europe. The original Glass Menagerie with Laurette Taylor is another one, and Taylor’s performance remains so influential – even though there is only a couple minutes of footage of it – you can say it changed acting forever, 10 years before Brando came along. The Victorian-era’s Lyceum Theatre’s productions of Macbeth and Much Ado, with one of the most famous actors of her time, Ellen Terry – and innovative stage techniques, set design, lighting – caused a sensation which you can still feel over a century later. These are the ones that come to mind.
Word of Peter Brook’s Midsummer filtered down to us acting students in college, two decades after the production. The chairperson of our department saw Brook’s Mahabarata in New York and told us about it, how he designed it, its vision, its mood and set, while also giving us context on who Brook was, the gigantism of his career and his impact. She passed it on to us. The controversy around that production was nothing new, par for the course, completely valid, and yet also slightly irrelevant, considering the impact. The same was true of his Marat/Sade – and also Midsummer. Purists resented him. C’est la vie.
Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often called Peter Brook’s Dream, that’s how singular a vision it was.
We need to understand we are in a continuum. We need to understand that the tradition of experimental theatre is in Brook’s debt, although he did not get there first (which he acknowledged – Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty” was a major influence on Brook, as was the revolutionary career of Joan Littlewood, who brought Brendan Behan’s The Hostage to America). Brook was totally establishment, artistic director of the RSC, etc., but was also a dynamic and inventive director. He didn’t play it safe at all.
His book The Empty Space should be required reading for theatre major undergraduates (we read it in our theatre history class), and if you haven’t read it, well, there’s my recommendation! Like I said: the past has valuable lessons for us and it’s important to understand the continuum of the avant-garde, so that we can recognize it – and not instinctively reject it – when it shows up again.
There aren’t many pictures of Peter Brook’s Dream, but what we have is eloquent.
I have dreamt about going back in time so that I could see that production (among others).
He was a giant. RIP
