Visionary director known for his daring and visually striking stage productions

‘‘Taste, test, question and never reach a conclusion.’’ Peter Brook on directing

Peter Brook

theatre director b March 21, 1925 d July 2, 2022

Peter Brook, who has died aged 97, was a visionary British theatre director who staged groundbreaking productions on both sides of the Atlantic, helping to demonstrate his belief that the trappings of conventional theatre were inessential to the art form.

Brook was a towering figure in international theatre, widely described as the most influential director of his generation, if not of the late 20th century. His work ranged from the minimalist to the grandiose, from a stripped-down staging of Bizet’s Carmen to a nine-hour adaptation of the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, which he originally staged at a limestone quarry complete with an artificial lake.

He cited the Russian Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff as a key influence, noting the spiritual teacher’s insistence on questioning everything. ‘‘Taste, test, question and never reach a conclusion,’’ he said.

In his directorial career, that meant bouncing between artistic forms and genres, looking for new ways to delight, provoke and unsettle audiences. ‘‘I have really spent all of my working life in looking for opposites.’’

Brook bridged the worlds of commercial and experimental theatre, directing canonical works by Shakespeare and Chekhov, modernist plays by Samuel Beckett and Jean Cocteau, and romantic comedies and musicals.

He won Tony Awards in 1966 and 1971, for directing Peter Weiss’ brutal drama Marat/ Sade and a pared-down, white-box production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The latter featured actors spinning plates and swinging on a trapeze and ended with the cast leaving the stage to shake hands with the audience.

Brook also directed operas and films, including a popular 1963 screen adaptation of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, and a bleak 1971 adaptation of King Lear, starring Paul Scofield.

A pioneer of gender and colour-blind casting, he worked with many of the leading actors of his era, including John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Glenda Jackson, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. By his mid-20s, he was directing plays in Birmingham, Stratford and London, where he acquired a reputation as a prodigy – ‘‘a superconfident, baby-faced wonder boy who likes to shock’’, as Time magazine put it in 1949.

At times he called himself a ‘‘distiller’’ rather than a ‘‘director’’. ‘‘Simple, pure, simple,’’ he would say. As he continued to experiment, he set down his theories in lectures and books such as The Empty Space (1968). ‘‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage,’’ he began. ‘‘A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.’’

Proving his point, he mounted international touring productions that could be performed outdoors, often with rugs serving as a stage. The vehicle for his theatrical explorations became the International Centre for Theatre Research (also known by its French acronym, CIRT), which he founded after moving to Paris in 1970.

His epic adaptation of the Mahabharata featured a cast of 21 actors from 16 countries and toured the world for four years. But it also prompted a backlash from scholars and critics who accused Brook of appropriating Indian culture, ‘‘decontextualised it from its history in order to sell it to audiences in the west’’, as Indian author and director Rustom Bharucha put it.

Brook acknowledged that the play ‘‘would never have existed without India’’ but defended his interpretation of the text. ‘‘When we did it, Indians said, ‘Here you are, colonialists, stealing our heritage,’ ’’ he said in 2019. ‘‘I said, ‘No, it belongs to the world.’ And I know that you have little companies all over India who do Shakespeare. Has anyone ever said, ‘This belongs to England?’ ’’

Peter Stephen Paul Brook was born in London to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked as chemists, running a company that developed a popular chocolate-flavoured laxative called Brooklax.

As a boy, Brook dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent, viewing journalism as an escape from what he considered the dreary world of middle-class London. After graduating from Oxford in 1944, he filmed advertising shorts and worked on a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion for troops overseas. He was soon directing operas at Covent Garden.

By 1953, he had arrived in New York, where he directed a production of Gounod’s Faust for the Metropolitan Opera. That same year, he directed his first film, The Beggar’s Opera, a rare musical to star Olivier.

Brook was named commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1965 and Companion of Honor in 1998. In 1951, he married actress Natasha Parry, who went on to appear in many of his productions. She died in 2015. He is survived by film-maker son Simon and director daughter Irina.