Peter Brook died this Saturday in Paris, at the age of 97. A huge director with an abundant and prestigious career, he had lived in France since 1974. This son of emigrants from Latvia (a country then part of the Russian Empire) was born in London in 1925. It was in England that he turned to the theater, because the world of cinema seemed inaccessible to him at the end of the war. He was then studying Russian literature at Oxford.
He signed his first professional staging at the age of 21, was appointed production manager at the Royal Opera of Covent Garden at the age of 23. And is fired a few months later. His staging of a play by Richard Strauss in surreal settings by Salvador Dali did not pass.
Meet the theater
After working in New York and the United Kingdom for many years, in 1970 he created an International Center for Theater Research. With this troupe, he plays everywhere, far from the theaters: in immigrant homes in Paris, in the Sahara, in the streets of the Bronx, at the St-Anne hospital in Paris, in companies, garages…
In 1974, he took over the Bouffes du Nord theater in the Chapelle district of Paris. A place that is falling apart, in a popular district, to bring theater where people don’t go.