D‘a Dream of a summer night at Stormthe vacuum theorist and director Peter Brook died on Saturday July 2, announces Agence France-Presse, confirming information from the World. Of British nationality, he had settled in France since the mid-1970s. Peter Brook is also a theater, that of the Bouffes du Nord, in the 10ᵉ arrondissement of Paris, which he directed for many decades before moving away in 2010. Born in London on March 21, 1925, this son of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants made his first production at the age of 17.
If he dreams of cinema, he quickly heads for the theater. At 20, an Oxford graduate, he was already a professional director and, two years later, his productions in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, unleashed passions. In his thirties, he was already directing big hits on Broadway. For the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), he staged many texts of the “Bard”, which for him is “the filter through which the experience of life passes”.
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His Marat/Sade fascinated London and New York and earned him a Tony Award in 1966. But at the end of the 1960s, after forty theatrical successes in which he had directed the greatest, from Laurence Olivier to Orson Welles, Brook claimed to have “exhausted the possibilities of conventional theatre” and enters an experimental period. In a constant quest for authenticity, he travels to Africa, Iran or the United States and conducts experimental work there focused on the “deconditioning” of the actor and the relationship with the spectator.
Peter Brook’s love for theater came as a child, when he played around with puppets to recreate the famous play Hamlet. At the age of 25, he will begin to work at Covent Garden, a Mecca of London culture. It was during this experience that he will seek at all costs to innovate during the production of Salome, an opera by Richard Strauss. From the 1950s, he embarked on television adaptations of famous works: King Lear with Orson Welles in the title role, in 1953 or the adaptation on the big screen of the novel by Marguerite Duras moderato cantabile, with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. His best-known play is “The Mahabharata”, a nine-hour epic of Hindu mythology (1985), adapted for the cinema in 1989.
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The creator of empty space
In 1962, Peter Brook embarked on what would become his trademark: “empty space”. Indeed, he decides to give up any decoration in order to force the spectator to imagine the environment of the people according to the scenes and the acts. “I can take any empty space and call it a scene. Someone crosses this empty space while someone else observes it, and that is enough for the theatrical act to be initiated”. These famous opening lines would become a “manifesto” for alternative and experimental theatre. Four years later, the director would engage politically with USa play on the Vietnam War where nothing is written and where the work relies entirely on the actors’ improvisation.
From 1971, Peter Brook began his rapprochement with France, which he would never leave again. That year, he founded the International Center for Theater Research. The objective: to work with actors from several countries and thus discover new ways of doing theatre. Still, in 1971, he and the producer Micheline Rozan discovered in Paris an Italian-style theater about to be demolished: it was the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. He settled there with his theatrical research center. In 1974, for the reopening, it attracted a large audience with Timon of Athens, written by Shakespeare. Never Peter Brook will embark on work to renovate the room. He will simply set up a fore-stage located at the same level as the public bleachers. Today, the hall has become a center of French and European theatrical culture.
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After an adventure of more than 35 years at the Bouffes du Nord, Peter Brook left the management of the theater in 2010, at the age of 85, while continuing to stage productions there. “All my life, the only thing that has counted, and that’s why I work in the theater, is what lives directly in the present,” he told AFP at the time. The charismatic director was shaken in 2015 by the death of his wife, actress Natasha Parry. “We try to negotiate with fate by saying: ‘Bring her back just for 30 seconds…'” In addition to his faithful collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, he leaves behind two children, the director Simon Brook and the theater director Irina Brook.