The Economist
March 19, 2005
U.S. Edition
A man of all seasons
British theatre
PAUL SCOFIELD, who was superbly directed by Peter Brook in “King
Lear” in 1962, was first struck by the director’s ice-blue eyes.
Adrian Mitchell, a poet who was involved in an anti-Vietnam
propaganda play directed by Mr Brook, felt he was looking into eyes
of astonishing power. Michael Kustow, the staunch, loyal author of
this authorised biography, published just as Mr Brook turns 80,
refers to “ancient, glittering” eyes – like one of W.B. Yeats’s scholar
mystics.
Mr Brook’s right eye stares out of the British edition of this book.
As a defining image, it reflects other qualities: stubbornness,
wilfulness and mischief. After all, this is the stage director who,
in the 1960s, declared: “The theatre has to face the death of the
word.” Mr Brook has always courted controversy, though he does not
always like its consequences. Sir David Hare, an English playwright,
caused great offence when he described some of Mr Brook’s recent work
at his Centre International de Recherches Thétrales in Paris as an
exile’s “universal hippie babbling which represents nothing but a
fright of commitment.”
The great man, who is impatient with criticism and critics, will have
no quarrel with Mr Kustow’s sympathetic and comprehensive celebration
of a remarkable life in the theatre. It provides what the critics
will require – an accurate picture of what Mr Brook has done and said.
For example, Mr Kustow identifies an unlikely coupleof influential
figures: Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff, an eccentric Armenian-Russian
occultist, who, to express his philosophy generously, believed that
people sleepwalk through life and need waking up, and Jerzy
Grotowski, a Polish director, who, according to Mr Kustow, is a
“teacher in the tradition of the seer and the shaman.”
Mr Brook was born in west London on March 21st 1925, the son of
enterprising Russian-Jewish refugees. (His father’s pharmaceutical
company made a well-known laxative called Brooklax.) A precocious
child, he staged a puppet performance of “Hamlet” when he was ten,
describing it as being “by William Shakespeare and Peter Brook”. When
he directed “Hamlet” again 65 years later at the Bouffes du Nord – the
theatre in Paris to which he transferred his affections from London
when he was 45 – it was renamed “The Tragedy of Hamlet, adapted and
directed by Peter Brook”. This version was heavily cut and much
transposed. As Mr Brookexplained: “I don’t think Shakespeare’sgenius
shone through every detail.”
Mr Brook has always believed that he knows best, and there is strong
evidence that sometimes he is right – in his “King Lear” and “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both for the Royal Shakespeare Company,
when he had no quarrel with Shakespeare’s genius. He also made a
memorable film adaptation of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”,
his revenge for an unhappy time at English public schools, and a
celebrated production of a Hindu epic, “Mahabharata”, which drew a
large multi-racial and multi-lingual audience.
Mr Brook provides a compellingaccount of his eclectic working methods
in a short book of lectures called “The Open Door”. Both his account,
and Mr Kustow’s, suggest that he is happiest with texts that he has
prepared himself. He has become his own stage designer and usually
chooses his own musical accompaniment. What he likes best is to roll
out a carpetunder a tree and perform for audiences, like children,
who have no knowledge of the conventions of the western theatre. Mr
Brook does not like theatres, or box offices, or the pragmatic London
theatre producers. He does admit that sponsors are necessary, but
“they must be enlightened”.
Perhaps this suggests that Mr Brook is in thrall to an idealistic,
other-worldly vision of the theatre. Mr Kustow reckons that his
singular achievement is to have breathed life into it. Only a churl
would disagree.