In 1979, Peter Brook made a film based on Gurdjieff’s book Meetings with Remarkable Men. I was lucky enough to have countless encounters with the remarkable man that Brooke was: there were newspaper interviews, radio programmes, public meetings at the Royal Stock Exchange in Manchester and the National Film Theater in London, private chats at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris. You may have thought that repetition and staleness would set in. But every encounter with Brooke was, at least for me, fresh and invigorating.
What impressed me most about Brooke? As one would expect from the great guide to modern theatre, his boundless curiosity. This took many forms. He was always fascinated, to begin with, by the mechanics of interviewing. He wanted to know how the tape recorder worked, who gave the green light in the radio studio, how I would transmit a written interview.
He was also endlessly curious about the state of British theatre. He was always keen to hear about the latest productions and was particularly keen to learn about the RSC. The last I heard from him was in response to an article I wrote about the future of the company, where I suggested that it might be time for an actor to take the helm. I got an email from Brooke’s sister-in-law, Nina Sufi, who said that Peter had seen the piece and was generally supportive.
Something else I learned from our interviews was Brooke’s agreement with my thesis that the clean division of his career into two phases after he moved to Paris in 1970 was artificial. I have long argued that Brooke’s pursuit of greater simplicity is visible in shows such as his 1957 Stratford Tempest and his 1958 musical Irma la Douce. Similarly, his love of theatrical magic informed his work at Bouffes du Nord. But Brooke himself, in an interview we did in Manchester in 1994, revealed that for him the real change in his approach came with the Theater of Cruelty season staged at the Lamda in 1964. He told me that before that he had always been forced to work within a fixed time frame and achieve a result.
Peter Brook directs a rehearsal of the Mahabharata at the Bouffes du Nord. Photo: Julio Donoso/Sygma/Getty Images
This season, inspired by Artaud, gave him the freedom, for the first time in his career, to experiment, although it led to a public performance and entered his Marat/Sade production. If there is a divide in Brooke’s life and work, I suspect it comes from the shaman/showman antithesis that I coined many years ago and which has been oft repeated. This is pure play on words, but I feel slightly guilty about it, since a shaman is a priest who claims to communicate with gods. Brooke made no such claim: he was simply a filmmaker, as he once told me, “penetrating human issues through human material.”
If Brooke was on a constant mission, he never lost his showman instinct. I once asked him why, in his extremely austere production of La Tragédie de Carmen, he introduced a burst of lavishly recorded Bizet just before the climax. “Well,” he said, “the audience always needs a lift four-fifths of the way through the show.”
The best example of his showmanship, however, came when I saw his production of The Mahabharata in Zurich in 1987. The evening began with a speech by Brooke, in which he cheekily told the audience: “We’re going to spend the night together. ” I had never known Brooke to preface his show with an intro and I wondered why he did that. I got my answer about 11 hours later, as this epic of death and destruction ended on a note of healing harmony, the back wall of the theater parted to reveal the dawn sunlight dancing on the waters of Lake Zurich. Brooke had timed everything to perfection, so that, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, he seemed to have nature itself in his hands.
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