Peter Brook: A Biography (original) (raw)

Arts|Peter Brook: A Biography

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/arts/peter-brook-a-biography.html

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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.

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