Peter Brook’s death prompted a fanfare of tributes that have transformed his radicalism into theatrical chic. It’s what happens to our cultural icons. Once they are safely dead and unable to fire arrows at the establishment, they quickly become national treasures.
From the start Brook, the son of a Russian Menshevik émigré, dazzled his contemporaries with an exceptional talent for upsetting convention. Appointed Director of Productions at the Royal Opera House at 22, he was quickly dispatched after the singer playing Salome refused to take her curtain call in protest at his direction.
Audience awakeners
Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty – following Antonin Artaud’s radical theatre movement of the same name – used gesture, light and image, rather than text, to awaken and shock audiences. This led to two remarkable shows, US and then Marat/Sade.
Marat/Sade by the German Marxist Peter Weiss aimed to shake audiences out of their bourgeois complacency. The play, which restages the French Revolution, itself performed as a play within a play, often seems to be careering out of control. Consider the end of Brook’s production when the audience applauded the actors. Still in role as inmates, the actors jeered and mocked the audience defying the standard convention of ending a play with a restoration of ‘normality’. The lunatics appeared to have taken over the asylum.
One of Brook’s aims was to offer audiences a visceral taste of the madness, violence and excitement of revolution. With US, by radical poet Adrian Mitchell, opposition to the war in Vietnam was brought home to the UK. Tell Me Lies about Vietnam by Mitchell had electrified audiences at the 1965 Royal Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation, itself a harbinger of ‘the happening’ and the unfolding cultural revolution.
Brook refused to conform to the idea of a profit-driven commercial art-form where the programme needs to be regular, prompt, and marketable
What really fired Brook into the pantheon was his RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970. This legendary production not only shook this revered pastoral classic upside down but also destroyed any sense of servility to a fossilised version of Shakespeare that had so stuffily and boringly served ruling class culture and its deadly curriculum. Here, the acting space was transformed into a crisp white box set with trapezes, clowns, plate-spinners and other circus crafts.
The play’s magic had been redefined in metaphorical terms. Gradually, the stage was becoming freed of unnecessary furniture and becoming more of an empty playground where creativity could thrive. Shakespeare, the core icon of English identity and culture, had been booted off his elite pedestal and liberated from deadly assumptions.
The English arts establishment was entirely unsympathetic to his artistic vision. Brook’s commitment to ensemble theatre was challenging enough (not to mention expensive). He refused to conform to the idea of a profit-driven commercial art-form where the programme needs to be regular, prompt, and marketable. According to Brook, the show would open when it was ready, not when the marketing department told you.
The experimental possibilities of France
Brook experienced the same petty parochialism as the other great theatre revolutionary of that time, Joan Littlewood. Both these champions of radical ensemble theatre left England for France as in Brook’s case, France’s expansive cultural policies encouraged him to experiment without fear of constant invigilation by bean-counters and utilitarians.
On the question of access, elitism and empty houses, Brook suggested, following the Soviet model, that tickets should either be cheap or free – another idea that alienated commercial theatre producers. So, despite the immense acclaim that greeted Brook’s Dream, he decided to create a new cross-cultural theatrical experience, The International Centre for Theatre Research, at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris.
Brook’s remarkable journey for the next half century, featured shows with moments of breath-taking chutzpah and genius. The exhilarating Conference of the Birds, based on a Sufi poem Ubu, the macabre, surrealist, juvenile anti-Macbeth; the mesmerising, stripped-back, all-the-hits version of Carmen, and his late century return to the UK with the legendary nine hour epic The Mahabharata. These are just a few memorable pearls from an astonishing string of performances.
Some questionable choices
For all his undoubted achievements, it’s not difficult to question some of the choices he made after the seventies. His obsession with Gurdjieff, the mystic Sufi, became the subject of his film Meetings with Remarkable Men. The charge of orientalism has been made before now as has the case for appropriation, especially with The Mahabharata. This has become a contentious issue for theatre-makers as the assault on western white supremacy in the arts has finally begun to break the mould bringing with it a wave of new issues.
To create this massive epic, Brook directed twenty one actors from sixteen countries with five musicians playing dozens of African and Asian instruments under Toshi Tsuchitori’s direction. He argued that he had always been a storyteller, never a polemicist, and furthermore The Mahabharata was equal to the entire works of Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare, Brook argued ‘The Mahabharata is a very revolutionary work…there is a lack of linear thinking. I have never respected any formal ideology or formal morality…Whenever I have been confronted with a play that shows only one point of view, I have been unable to see that that represents the truth. The basis of the Elizabethan theatre made something unexpected appear through the contradictions’.
Not only is this fascinating, it’s also effectively dialectical. Yet there is something grotesque about his 1971 site-specific production of Orghast by Ted Hughes in the ruins of Persepolis in Iran. Not only did this no doubt brilliant show provide cover to the Shah’s ruthless dictatorship. It was made possible only through funding from the Iranian Government and was, according to The New York Times, attended by the Queen of Iran herself.
The contradictions here are unbearable and unsupportable. Brook spoke of finding a theatrical language ‘that transcends nationality, and the cultural and social forms that already exist’. While one can contest or applaud his making the case for artistic freedom, how can you not take issue with his drift into wobbly philosophy? Political naivety would be the kindest way to explain his failure to challenge a bloody, torturing dictator.
Beyond the stage, Brook’s ideas and writings on theatre dazzle with clarity, wit and ingenuity. He was as much a master of language as he was of the stage. And he will no doubt continue to inspire theatre-makers for generations to come. Ultimately, after a lifetime of searching his great discovery was that theatre depends on only one thing: the shape-shifting human being whose unique ability is to tell and share stories.
In his own words, ‘I side with Hamlet when he calls for a flute and cries out against the attempt to sound the mystery of a human being, as though one could know all its holes and stops’.
