He changed the face of theater forever. Peter Brook, staging legend, died on Saturday July 2 in Paris. Theater and opera director, in constant research, theoretician of the “empty space” which must awaken the imagination of the public, follower of the exchange between cultures, the Briton was also a film director and had written a dozen books.
For eight decades, in London and then in his Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris, he offered innovative interpretations of the great classics such as Shakespeare, and explored the universal myths of the world such as the Hindu Mahâbhârata.
“I have never believed in a single truth. Whether it is mine or that of others. I believe that all schools, all theories can be useful in a certain place, at a given time. But I believe that you can only live by identifying passionately, and absolutely, with a point of view. However, over time, as we change, as the world changes, the objectives change and the point of sight moves”he said on the site of the Bouffes du Nord.
Peter Brook was born in London on March 21, 1925, into a family of Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to the United Kingdom. As a child, he knows that he will do theatre. At 5 years old already, he plays Hamlet in a small puppet theater his father built for him. He began his career as a director at a very young age: at the age of 23 he staged numerous texts by Shakespeare for the Royal Shakespeare Company and conducted operas for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. In the 1950s and 1960s in London, he also staged Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Miller, Jean Genet and Bernard Shaw.
From 1962, he gave up decoration and developed the concept of “empty space”: “I can take any empty space and call it a stage. Someone walks through that empty space while someone else watches, and that’s enough to get the theatrical act started”he writes in his book empty spacepublished in English in 1968, and in 1977 in French (Editions du Seuil).
He moved to Paris in 1970, created the International Center for Theatrical Research and took over the Bouffes du Nord theater, a small Italian theater disused since 1952, which he revived. He reopened it in 1974 with Timon of Athens of Shakespeare. The room, of intimate size, offers a great proximity between the public and the actors. The walls will always remain in the state he found them.
“You need very little to touch the imagination and when I was going to see huge and complicated shows at a very young age, it was less convincing for me than what I could do with my little theater at home, with very simple means”he declared on February 8, 2021 to France Culture.
Alongside Chekhov or Shakespeare, Peter Brook is interested in the cultures of the world, in what is universal about them. In 1979, he staged The Bird Conference, a collection of medieval poems in the Persian language published by the Sufi poet Farid al-Attar in the 12th century. And in 1985, he produced his most ambitious work, which required ten years of preparation, the Mahâbhârata, a great Hindu epic, a nine-hour show that he created in Avignon and performed again at the Bouffes du Nord. He will adapt it for the cinema in 1989.
“The Mahâbhârata is an epic, with heroes and gods, fabulous animals. At the same time, the work is intimate. That is to say, the characters are vulnerable, full of contradictions, totally human”said Peter Brook. For this show, as for others, he stages actors from all over the world: he brings together, among others, the British Bruce Myers, the Frenchman Maurice Bénichou, the formidable Malian griot actor Sotigui Kouyaté, the Indian Mallika Sarabhai, Italian Vittorio Mezzogiorno…
Because the exchange between cultures is essential for him. In 1979 in Avignon, where he presented The Bird Conferencehe had declared to Antenne 2 that he liked “that our work is a reflection of the world, which is a very mixed world, where people from very different cultures are forced to live together and meet.” He had also traveled a lot with his troupe in Asia, South America, Africa.
About his work with the actors, he confided on September 27, 2020 to the Swiss daily Le Temps: “Above all, I don’t want to give them the impression that I know everything and that I am giving them instructions. We are comrades, we hold hands and we continue the journey together.”
In the same article, he spoke about his relationship with the public: “My concern has always been not to get bored and not to bore others. I have often observed this in cinemas: past the shock of a first image, people doze off. We have no right to knock them out. We play so that spectators tired after a day’s work are captivated.”
“Overly serious shows bored me and I wanted to add a grain of comic salt to them”, he added. “Conversely, if it was too comical, I felt the need to introduce a little gravity. Shakespeare offered me that: this alternation of humor and tragedy so essential for me.”
In addition to dozens of plays, Peter Brook has directed operas: Bohemian (1948), Boris Godunov (1948), The olymps (1949), Salome (1949) and The Marriage of Figaro (1949) at Covent Garden in London (United Kingdom), Faust (1953), Eugene Onegin (1957) at the Metropolitan of New York (USA), The Tragedy of Carmen (1981) and Impressions of Pelleas (1992) at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and Don Giovanni (1998) for the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. In 2010 he created A magic flute with Marie-Hélène Estienne and Franck Krawczyk, after Mozart and Schikaneder.
He has also made films: Moderato Cantabilebased on the novel by Marguerite Duras (1959), His Majesty of the Flies (1963), Marat/Sade (1967), King Lear (1969), Meetings with remarkable men (1976), The Mahabharata (1989) and The Tragedy of Hamlet (2002).
In 2010, Peter Brook handed over to the management of the Bouffes du Nord theater but continued to work. In September 2020, at the age of 95, he still opened the season of the National Popular Theater (TNP) in Villeurbanne (Rhône), with a workshop around Storm of Shakespeare and the presentation of his latest creation whyon the question of the interest of dramatic art. “I hate the idea of a director who is there like the boss”, he said. He preferred to talk about “guide who has already made this path”. Always looking for what’s right on stage, he always wondered : “Why do theatre? What does it rhyme with?”
In 1991 Peter Brook received the director’s Molière for Storm. In 2019, he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize in Spain. The jury hailed him “the best theater director of the 20th century”.