Mourning ‘a giant of the theater’
On July 2 the international theater, opera, and film director Peter Brook left our world. At age 97, his death could hardly be considered premature. Yet to generations of theater-makers, his presence felt eternal, as if he had always been present and always would be. His shows, his writings, and his immense curiosity have, like the sun, illuminated the way for all the rest of us, in the theater and beyond, allowing us to see further and more clearly.
Yoshi Oida, an accomplished classical Noh actor who left everything behind in his native Japan to join Mr. Brook’s experimental acting troupe in Paris in 1968, has written on social media, “he went away not bring me (sic)!!! I have no energy to continue to work. I want to follow now.”
Peter Brook was a giant of the theater, whose passing almost seems incredible. He was a child wonder, directing the likes of John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier in his 20s, a guiding light in the avant-garde theater of the 1960s, and a constant presence in my own life.
As a mime student in Paris in the early 1980s and later a student and actor with Giorgio Strehler in Milan, I found in him a constant point of reference. As a director of Shakespeare, he created productions which forever changed the way we read and think of certain plays. (His kinetic “Midsummer Night’s Dream” on swings remains, of course, front of mind, but so do his productions of “Love’s Labours Lost” and “Measure for Measure,” which contributed largely to returning those plays to the repertoire.) He was a visionary entertainer and a true philosopher of the performing arts, one who could create shows of wide appeal and also call into question our most commonly held theatrical beliefs.
I am so grateful that I got to hear him speak at a talk he gave in Como, Italy, in the late 1980s and to meet him afterward — he was a very gentle and soft-spoken man whose cadences revealed a laserlike focus. Taking his time to speak, he could not help but spark and sparkle through the deepest, brightest blue eyes imaginable. Like my own master-teacher, Giorgio Strehler, he was a true maestro, one who dedicated his entire being not only to making better theater but to making the theater a better place from which to better our world, not least by drawing to his side at his Centre International de Recherche Theeâtrale, or CIRT, in Paris an extraordinary circle of artist-actors from every continent on the planet. While here in the United States we have long since all-but-abandoned the notion of a repertory company of artists, his was truly just such a collective. His wisdom, his guidance, and his living presence will be deeply, deeply missed.