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Conversations with Peter Brook 1970-2000
By Margaret Croyden
Faber and Faber
£12.99
301 pages
Dateline: 7th May, 2004
There is a long backstory that leads into this book of interviews with
Peter Brook. He first came to prominence as a theatre director when
he was 20 just after the Second World War and has maintained a reputation
as one of the great directors ever since.
The first of these interviews did not take place until he was 45 and
therefore the man portrayed is Brook in his middle and later years.
The more commercial triumphs of the Forties and Fifties and his work
at the Royal Opera House and with the RSC are only referred to peripherally.
By the time that Margaret Croyden first sat down with Brook as he was
taking his new version of A Midsummer Night's Dream to New York
in 1971, he had come under the influence of Jerzy Grotowski and embarked
on his years of experimentation at the International Centre of Theater
Research based at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.
Croyden is an excellent interviewer. Because she is a friend of her
"victim" she is often combative and occasionally argumentative
in her efforts to help her readers to understand Brook's life and work.
Over this period, he drove himself and his company unbelievably hard
in a search for purity of performance. For him, the search was all.
"I think you could really divide the whole population into those
who have given up searching and those who continue to search".
The subtext is surely a division of humanity into those who are mentally
alive and those who are not.
He would take nothing for granted and left nothing to chance, demanding
unbelievably long rehearsal periods in order to achieve perfection.
He never seems to have been happier than when he had removed all preconceptions
and as likely as not, was performing for people who had never seen a
stage show in their lives. His modesty too is unbelievable for a man
of the theatre, "I have no sense whatever of pride or achievements".
The early part of the book covers the beginnings of the International
Centre and its ethos. This was expanded by two monumental trips. The
first was to the hills of Iran where a play written by Ted Hughes in
an invented language called Orghast was performed amongst cliffs. Brook
followed this up with an even harder physical trip to Africa where the
company performed for villagers in an effort to take performance back
to its essence. Despite sickness and exhaustion the man was in his element
and possibly never happier.
Much of Brook's philosophy was derived from the Greek-Armenian philosopher
G I Gurdjieff, a man at glorified in the film Meetings with Remarkable
Men. Tellingly, the director begins to get tetchy and defensive
when asked to relate the film and the philosopher to his own life and
views.
Further steps into philosophy of a different kind occur in what is
perhaps his magnum opus, the all-night playing of The Mahabarata.
From there, he was able to become involved in ground-breaking productions
such as his Antony and Cleopatra starring Alan Howard and Glenda
Jackson, The Tempest with a most unlikely Ariel and a largely
improvised version of his own play, The Man Who, based on Oliver
Sacks' book about mental illness.
Brook has always been happy to court controversy and did so in two
other works, La Tragédie de Carmen and The Tragedy
of Hamlet in which he took the familiar and carved it into his own
very singular vision, much to the annoyance of some critics but not
the public who lapped them up.
This is a fascinating book about a man who was arguably the finest
and most innovative theatre director of the period from the Second World
War to the end of the last century. His thirst for knowledge and desire
to prove his own theories right is second to none. Margaret Croyden
is to be congratulated for doing an excellent job in drawing him out
and in particular for ensuring that the often complex theories are expounded
in a language that is intelligible to both the expert and the interested
layman.
Philip Fisher
You
can buy Conversations
with Peter Brook: 1970-2000 from our Bookshop for £10.15
Articles Indices:
Articles from 2004
Articles from 2003
Articles from 2002
Articles from 2001
Articles from 2000
Articles from 1999
Articles from 1998
Articles from 1997
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