‘I still think middle-class theatre is deadly’
Peter Brook led the war against ‘cosy’ theatre. And, at 93, he’s still fighting,
‘Theatre can be like someone you’re initially glad to meet but then starts droning on and on’
Peter Brook is famous for lambasting conventional theatre as “deadly”. In a seminal book, The Empty Space, published 50 years ago next month, the director sent shock waves through the establishment by attacking commercial productions as “excruciatingly boring” and issuing a clarion call to declutter theatre and do battle with conventionality, cosiness and polite society expectations.
Half a century later Brook, arguably the most influential British director of modern times (albeit he has been based in Paris for five decades), believes the “deadly” theatre is still with us.
“I stand by that phrase,” he says, amusement in his voice. “Theatre can look so promising but prove so deadly, like someone you’re initially glad to meet but then starts droning on and on. That comfortable middle-class theatre – and the opera, where people go to sleep or to have a nice chat.”
Would he care to name and shame? “We can each think of our own examples,” he replies.
One tends to appraise Brook in reverential terms – particularly now he has reached the venerable age of 93 – but it’s his spry irreverence that comes across as he readies himself to head over the Channel and on up to the Edinburgh International Festival to present his first work there since 1951, when he treated audiences at the Lyceum to The Winter’s Tale, starring John Gielgud as Leontes.
That immediate gilded postwar period – when he shot like a greyhound into public consciousness, a prodigy, a wunderkind, fresh out of Oxford – saw Brook at his most commercially successful but moving ever further from the glittering West End. His hankering for harsh depth over pleasing surface manifested itself in an austere King Lear at Stratford in 1962 with Paul Scofield that had the force of a thunderclap. The restlessness continued with Marat/sade (1964) – hailed as the most sensational production staged by the RSC during the Sixties, its performers pushed to the psychological limits in their portrayal of a madhouse.
After a landmark Midsummer Night’s
Dream (1970) that banished the usual foresty frills, presenting it in a whitebox space, with trapezes and whirly tubes, he cut free altogether – setting up camp at the Bouffes du Nord, a crumbling 19th-century Parisian playhouse not far from the Gare du Nord, and turning it into a crucible for internationalist inquiry sans frontiers. Perhaps his most memorable French production was The Mahabharata, a 12-hour adaptation of a Sanskrit epic by Vyasa, which premiered in an Avignon quarry and ended at dawn.
In returning to the Festival – with two other productions from the Bouffes (Katie Mitchell’s staging of Marguerite Duras’s 1982 novella La Maladie de la Mort and Canadian director Robert Carsen’s production of The Beggar’s Opera) – he illustrates just what an artistic journey he has been on in the interim.
Back in 1954, the critic Kenneth Tynan observed of Brook that: “He belongs to the future, because he is obsessed not by words but by sights and sensations.” His latest piece, The Prisoner (co-written with long-term collaborator Marie-hélène Estienne), revolves around a striking image. A patricidal youth escapes incarceration but only on condition that he sits outside the prison and contemplates his crime until he has served his sentence; no bars but his conscience.
This production derives from an experience Brook himself had during his travels in the Sixties, when “I was trying to find traces of something finer and deeper than you could find in any Western society.”
In Afghanistan half a century ago, he was told about a young man performing this highly unusual, protracted act of penance outside a prison near Kandahar. “I found the way, saw the prisoner, sat with him in silence for a time, then left. I don’t know what happened to him, or what the crime was, but the story was so potent that whenever I told it people were interested. It’s like a fable.”
The work of Brook’s later years has tended to be on a smaller, more intimate scale than the work that made his name and focused on the search for meaning. For some this has meant he has “reduced” his output. Critics have even accused him of a deadliness himself.
David Lan, newly departed artistic director of the Young Vic (the prime UK port of call for Brook in recent years), suggests that: “We went through a period, maybe 10 years ago, when there was quite a lot of cynicism about Brook and his work but I think his authenticity has won out. He just keeps going, putting on shows.” His influence, he argues, is detectable right at the heart of the West End now.
“There was a touching moment when we were doing the last few workshops on The Jungle at the National Theatre Studio and Peter was doing some work in an upstairs room on The Prisoner. I brought him down to meet the actors, many of them from other countries. And Stephen Daldry and I just knew, without saying it, that we were indebted to him.”
For Fergus Linehan, director of the EIF, Brook may be a feted guru figure now, but he remains quintessentially connected to youth. “He was once asked why young people will spend 60 quid on a pair of trainers but not theatre tickets, and he said: ‘Well, trainers haven’t been a constant disappointment throughout their lives.’ His natural focus is the young. He ‘gets’ them.”
Part of the reason for this might be that Brook enjoyed his own youth so much. “I’ve always wanted to try things for myself before passing a judgment on them,” he says. “I couldn’t take a puritanical attitude towards drugs, saying ‘they’re bad’, unless I’d tasted them. I was grateful for the experience. In the same way, there I was at Oxford, a highly sexed teenager. No girls were admitted to my college. I was ready for sexual adventure and there was a young man whom I liked on every level. We had an affair.”
He went on to develop a “nature preference” for women, but it left him with a mistrust of categories, “of comparing homosexual and heterosexual experiences. That’s all a load of s---!” he exclaims and rings off. Peter Brook, 93, says “s---!” Deadly dull? Not a bit of it.
People and festival-goers of Edinburgh, you’re in luck.