Between Two Silences: Talking with Peter Brook

by Peter Brook, Dale Moffitt (Editor), Gregory A. Boyd (Foreword)

In this volume Peter Brook is in dialogue with college students and faculty. Theatre professor Dale Moffitt has edited and arranged by subject twelve hours of spontaneous question and answer sessions from Brook's visit to the Southern Methodist University campus.

Ranging widely over many topics, Brook talks about his innovative and award-winning production of Marat/Sade, his film and stage versions of King Lear, his nine-hour production of the Indian epic The Mahabharata. With passion and clarity he discusses acting, directing, auditions, film vs. the stage, his responses to the work of other theatre figures like Grotowski and Artaud, and the multiculturalism which characterizes his most recent work.

Genres: Theatre, Nonfiction

186 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Peter Brook is a world-renowned theater director, staging innovative productions of the works of famous playwrights. A native of London, he has been based in France since the 1970s.

Peter Brook's parents were immigrant scientists from Russia. A precocious child with a distaste for formal education but a love of learning, Brook performed his own four-hour version of Shakespeare's Hamlet at the age of seven. After spending two years in Switzerland recovering from a glandular infection, Brook became one of the youngest undergraduates at Oxford University. At the same time he directed his first play in London, a production of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Brook made his directing debut at the Stratford Theatre at the age of 21, with a production of Love's Labours Lost.

Over the next several years, Brook directed both theater and opera, as well as designing the sets and costumes for his productions. He eventually grew disillusioned with opera, calling it "deadly theater." He directed prominent actors, including Laurence Olivier in Titus Andronicus and Paul Schofeld in a filmed King Lear. He also directed a film adaptation of Lord of the Flies. In 1962, he was named a director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Despite his popular successes, Brook sought out alternative ways to create vibrant, meaningful theater. He directed a season of experimental theater with the Royal Shakespeare Company, inspired by Antonin Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty." He sought to turn away from stars and to create an ensemble of actors who improvised during a long rehearsal period in a search of the meaning of "holy theater."

Out of this search came Brook's finest work. In 1964 he directed Genet's The Screens and Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade, for which he received seven major awards and introduced Glenda Jackson to the theater. Influenced by Brecht and Artaud, Marat/Sade shocked the audience with its insane asylum environment. In 1966 he developed US, a play about the Vietnam experience and the horrors of war. Jerzy Grotowski, one of the most important theater directors of this century and a man who profoundly influenced Brook, came to work with the company during this production. Brook also did an adaptation of Seneca's Oedipus by poet Ted Hughes, a who continued to collaborate with him for many years. The culmination of this phase of Brook's work was his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1970). Using trapezes, juggling, and circus effects, Brook and his actors created a sense of magic, joy, and celebration in this interpretation of Shakespeare's play.

After this, Brook moved to Paris and founded the International Center of Theatre Research. He wanted to find a new form of theater that could speak to people worldwide--theater which was truly universal. He also wanted to work in an environment of unlimited rehearsal time in order to allow for a deep search-of-self for all involved. The first production that came out of this phase was Orghast (1971), which employed a new language developed by Ted Hughes. This production, performed at the ruins of Persepolis in Persia, used actors from many different countries.

Reviews

[Sondos · Rating 5 out of 5]

می‌خواستم ببینم چه می‌شود اگر ما کاری بی‌نهایت اساسی‌تر بکنیم، طوری که فقط انسان در آن باشد، انسان و نه هیچ چیز دیگر. درست مثل همین حالا که دور همیم. این بود که یک رشته تجربه و آزمایش را آغاز کردیم: با سفر، با گروه‌های مختلف، با کودکان، در افریقا، در شرق، اینجا در این کشور، با بداهه‌پردازی‌ها اجراهای کوچک بر اساس درون‌مایه‌ها و تمرین‌ها؛ اما همه‌ی آنها صرفاً برای این بودند که ببینیم عنصر اصلی تئاتر، یعنی انسان، بدون هیچ کمکی چه کار می‌تواند بکند. اینجا بود که کار من تغییر کرد.

میان دو سکوت
گفت‌و‌گو با پیتر بروک
دیل مافیت
مترجم: علی منصوری
نشر افراز

ص۸۱

[Romain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un homme traverse l’espace en silence, tandis qu’ on le regarde ; voilà le théâtre.

OUI.

- J'aime travailler au théâtre ; les films, j'aime les regarder.

- Pourquoi ?

- Pourquoi? Parce que quand vous faites un film, il y a une chose qui est, si vous avez l'expérience du théâtre, très difficile à digérer.

FACT

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Peter Brook opines. He does not pontificate, exactly; the persona is not that of a pontiff. He is Elegant Simplicity Itself.

One might think that Brook opining on the nature of theatre would be gnomic and austere. Well, he is—to a fault, to put it lightly. He boils down so severely that he is left with the commonplace.

There is a wonderful interview on YouTube in which Robert Wilson, paired with a bohemian madcap in a face-shrouding chapeau, proves himself to be excellently cultured and classy, nothing like the aw-shucks autistic child you might imagine. Peter Sellars’ perforations still give goosebumps to this day. Brook’s rhetoric not so much. Maybe the proof is in the putting—the recent Blu-ray release of his TELL ME LIES may reveal if Brook is all talk and no action.

[scherzo♫ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quotes:
"Are we awakening amongst ourselves something positive or are we just using our indignation to make ourselves more negative than we were? And if political theatre is one-sided, however justified the cause, if it doesn't simultaneously lead to something that is not only active but active in a healthy way then the political theatre is reproducing the conditions that produce the very thing that that theatre is denouncing. I think that's what one always has to weigh because there are moments when issues are so burning one can't keep silent about them. One has to see, however the danger of whether the cry of protest is hammering the nail in deeper, or whether the cry of protest is helping to pull the nail out."

"Brook's production of US, which dealt with the Vietnam war, culminated in one of the actors setting fire to butterflies. On this particular evening a woman got up from the front row of the stalls and climbed onto the stage of the Aldwych Theatre. She was a woman in her late fifties, balanced, sane, perfectly sort of middle class. She took the lighter and the box containing the butterflies out of the actor's hand, and she released the butterflies into the air. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she turned to the audience, and said, 'I'm not mad, and I'm not a fool. I just believe that there is something we can do.' Then she returned to her seat, and a discussion began which rocketed all around the theatre."

"Mahabharata is an extraordinarily dense, complex work, which on one level deals with the psychological misunderstandings that there can be anywhere on the inside of any family. On another level, it deals with the essence of politics, with what leads to factions, to strife, to conflict. On an even larger level, it is about what war is made of, and on a still wider level, the actual meaning of conflict, not in society, but in humanity and, you can even say, in cosmic existence."

"The most important thing for everyone, I think, is to be able to affirm and yield. To affirm strongly, otherwise your work is weak. And to yield willingly, otherwise you're pigheaded."

"Gertrude Stein wrote about Picasso that very few of us actually see with the eyes of our time. We actually look at our time, but because of all the memories, all the conditioning in our brain, we see with the eyes of yesterday. She wrote this at the beginning of cubism. When Picasso sees, as a cubist, he's not seeing with the eyes of tomorrow, he's actually seeing quite directly with the eyes of today, but it shocks people because they're still locked in the vision of yesterday."

[Abraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of transcribed discussions with Peter Brook, from a series of interviews at Texas Christian University about a decade ago, is beautifully edited and succeeds in bringing the reader into the conversation with Brook. The impression is of spending time with a man who has taken his work to a place where his intentions as a human being and his intentions as an artist need not compromise themselves in order to coexist. He speaks of the theater, and his work there, in such a way that you close the book with a kind of ideal in mine. What if you could take your desire to live in a more present and full manner and apply it unflinchingly to your art? What if you could overcome the pressures of style and money and industry and be direct with what you were trying to do?

[Jon Clausen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dale Moffitt has done a wonderful job of capturing the best and most profound of Peter Brook's statements in his visit to the University of Texas, Austin.

While much of it reiterates what Brook has previously stated in The Empty Space or The Open Door, the clarifications provided as he answers questions from Moffitt's audiences are insightful.