Legendary English theatre director Peter Brook came to prominence turning traditional Shakespearean reverence on its head. Now, at 84, he is returning to the Bard with a minimalist staging of love sonnets, which will come to Kilkenny in August
'I CAN TAKE any empty space and call it a bare stage," wrote Peter Brook in his 1968 book The Empty Space, ushering in a new philosophy that harked back to the purity of theatre in its simplest, storytelling form. This single utterance marked the beginning of Brook's legendary, cultish status as one of the most important theatre directors of the 20th century. Indeed his infamous treatise on the theatre has become such a universal touchstone to be almost a truism, his interest in multicultural performance spreading the word across countries, even continents.
Brook has been based at Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris since 1974, and he has created original work in the Middle East and Africa among other parts of the world. Even when we speak on the telephone he is in Poland, rehearsing a project about colonial Africa at the Grotowski Centre, which will tour to Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and the Barbican in London. He will be in Ireland this August with his latest production, Love Is My Sin, a staging of Shakespeare's love sonnets. At 84 years old, he continues to outdo himself – not to mention his contemporaries or younger generations – with his irrepressible productivity.
The shadow of Shakespeare has shaped Brook's career since he first began directing for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the age of 25, working with legendary classical actors such as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Paul Scofield. These were productions that turned traditional Shakespearean reverence on its head, animating the Elizabethan plays with an extraordinary vision that would see problem plays such as Measure for Measure, and little-performed plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, turned into popular works in the British repertoire through his visceral, visual approach.
BROOK TALKS ABOUT creative disagreements with the formidable theatre establishment of the time as a formative learning curve. “I was very young, working together with the greatest actors of the age, and if people were resistant to what I was doing, well that went partly with the times. But the real difficulty was with the actors who were only of a mediocre level – I called them the looming barons – those actors in secondary roles, who would disapprove. The great actors knew that what I was doing as a director was a collaboration. They understood that theatre only comes to life with other people, that the rehearsal room is the place where all your ideas are put in question, and they understood that what we were doing would change again when the work was put in front of an audience. And that is something I have witnessed throughout my life. A play should never be its best in rehearsal – that’s a horrific idea – and the first night should never be the best night either. It’s when you travel around the world, in front of different audiences, and the work is changing all the time – that’s the exciting, the vital, the most important thing.”
IT SEEMS A long journey from the sumptuous spectacle of his 1970 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream– his second turn directing the play – to the minimalist production of Love Is Our Sin, which strips theatricality back to the spoken word, to poetry. Brook does not see it as such; indeed he traces all theatre, all his own work, back to Shakespeare. "If all theatre is rooted in life, and I believe that it is, well then the model is always Shakespeare," he says. "For Shakespeare, everything is rooted in the flesh, in the conflicts of everyday life, and that speaks for both his poetry and his plays. [A production] can take very austere forms or very elaborate forms, but that will only be dictated by the themes, by the plays themselves. So with Love Is My Sin, working with poetry, we can create a rich and powerful impact with just two actors. A play like Julius Caesar, with its political and social conflict, is something different. But Shakespeare's model of everyday life, whether that's political or physical, informs everything we do, from the very smallest to the biggest show."
No matter the plays’ demands, Brook says that the process of his approach as director remains the same, even if it is different every time. “The key is starting from nothing,” he says. “But you mustn’t take that as a rule – it can only be found in rehearsal through trial and error. People sometimes think I mean you start with an empty space. You do, but what you do is you fill it, removing what you don’t need, so that what you’re left with is only what is necessary. Sometimes that means something spare, sometimes something elaborate, but you must discover it each time. That’s the real – the important – process.”
IF BROOK HIMSELF discovers this anew each time he directs a new production, it was something he first began to realise when he left the theatre altogether, travelling through the Middle East and Africa in the early 1970s with productions such as The Conference of the Birdsand The Ik, productions that had evolved from the intensive workshops he had been overseeing with a multicultural cast drawn from the International Centre for Theatre Research, which he had established in 1970. The research would eventually result in his production of a staged version of the Indian epic poem Mahabharata, which is often seen as the defining work of Brook's career. It was after "years of never being in a theatre space – performing in hospitals, supermarkets, in African villages, on streets", that Brook took over the derelict Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord on the outskirts of Paris. Its distressed, deconstructed interior, built in 1976, served as a perfect complement to Brook's evolving aesthetic.
He has been based there since, although last year he announced that he will be slowly handing over the reigns to his colleague, Olivier Mantei.
IF DEVOTEES SAW Brook's gradual relinquishment of the theatre as a first step towards retirement they were wrong. The travelling production of Love Is My Sinand premieres at Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and the Barbican later this year confirm that his creativity remains unshaken. But it surely must have marked a significant turning point for him – marked a moment of self-reflection on a career that has spanned six decades.
But Brook prefers not to be drawn into reminiscing, finding the idea of retrospection unhelpful for planning for the future, for being newly inspired. “I’m not interested in achievement or evaluation,” he concludes. “I like to think of my work as a long journey that I have been on, stopping at certain places along the way. And when I have moved on to the next stop, why would I look back at the place where I have been?”
Despite being a generous mentor for younger directors – he has held numerous workshops over the years with Irish practitioners – he insists that he has offered no such thing as advice for those beginning their journey, only encouragement. “The most important thing,” he says, as he rushes in to rehearsals, “is not to listen to anyone’s advice, least of all mine. The important part of the journey is to take it yourself, to find your own way. When you start from scratch anything is possible.”
Peter Brook's production of Love Is My Sin, Sonnets by William Shakespeare for CICT/Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, is at the Watergate Theatre as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival, Aug 13-15. www.kilkennyarts.ie