Revolutionary British theater director Peter Brook, whose enormous influence reached the whole world, has died aged 97.
Brooke redefined the way we think about theater with his productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford; at the Bouffes du Nord, the dilapidated Parisian music hall he made his home base for more than 30 years; in African villages where his actors improvised performances; and on the stages, both grand and humble, frequented by his world-traveling ensemble.
Many of his productions were celebrated for stripping the theater of excess and distilling the drama to its essentials, presented with a clear eye and elegant touch. Brooke’s landmark 1970 RSC version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, influenced by both Jerome Robbins ballet and Peking Circus, was performed in a white cube of a set and boasted trapezes, stilts and a forest of steel wire .In other outspoken Shakespeare productions, he directed John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Adrian Lester and Natasha Parry, to whom Brooke is married. His productions were noted for their diversity, with Brooke pioneering what he called “color-rich,” as opposed to “color-blind,” casting.
He also directed musicals, staged the protest play against the Vietnam War, co-created with Ted Hughes an experimental version of the Prometheus myth, and in a French career in 1985 staged the famous nine-hour version of the Mahabharata. He returned to the Sanskrit epic with his 2016 production Battlefield, staged with his longtime collaborator Marie-Hellen Estienne.
One of the theater’s most visionary and influential thinkers, he wrote several publications, including The Empty Space (1968), the opening of which outlined his vision: “I could take any empty space and call it a bare stage. One walks through this empty space while someone else looks on, and that’s all it takes to make a theatrical act engaging.
Kenneth Tynan said Brooke’s work was for the “theatre gourmet” because he “cooks with cream, blood and spices”. Brook also worked in film, including a 1963 adaptation of Lord of the Flies, and in opera, directing radically abridged productions of Carmen and The Magic Flute.
Groundbreaking… Peter Brook’s RSC production of King Lear starring Paul Schofield and Diana Rigg as Cordelia. Photo: Angus McBean/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images
He was born in London on March 21, 1925, and at the age of seven performed a four-hour version of Hamlet by himself for his parents. After attending Magdalen College, Oxford, he was soon at the Royal Opera House, where he directed Richard Strauss’s Salome, based on designs by Salvador Dalí. He directed Olivier as Titus Andronicus at Stratford for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1955, and when Peter Hall became artistic director of the RSC in 1958, he asked Brooke to assist him there. Brooke’s RSC productions include a 1962 production of King Lear – the play he considers “the crowning achievement of world theatre” – starring Paul Schofield.
Several of his plays received Broadway transfers, including the avant-garde Marat/Sade, which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1964. The show’s concept was that the Marquis de Sade staged a drama about French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat played by prisoners in a psychiatric hospital.
In 1970, Brook moved to Paris, where he established his International Center for Theater Studies. The company visited Africa, where his actors gave performances that “didn’t use anything that corresponded to the theater of the time – we wanted to play to an audience that was not conditioned by anything. Even experimentally, we wouldn’t make a play with a text, a theme or a name.’
In 1974, he transformed a neglected music hall located behind the Gare du Nord into a major destination for theater lovers: the Bouffes du Nord. The dilapidated building had only undergone minimal repairs, so its walls remained as charred as when Brooke found them. He opened the theater with a production of Timon of Athens, and the applause knocked pieces from the ceiling.
Peter Brook directed The Mahabharata at the Theater des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Photo: Julio Donoso/Sygma via Getty Images
The Man Who, which premiered in Paris in 1993, was inspired by neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which revisited the disorders of Sacks’ patients. Brooke’s own neurological research led to his work The Valley of Astonishment about synaesthesia, co-created with Estienne and presented at the Young Vic in London with Catherine Hunter in the cast.
Brooke directed Scofield and Lester as Hamlet for the screen as well as the stage, and his Mahabharata was also turned into an epic television series. He became a CBE in 1965 and a Companion of Honor in 1998. His production of The Prisoner was staged in Paris and at the Edinburgh Festival and the National Theater in London in 2018. This spring he returned to work on his play Tempest Project, adapted and directed with Estienne.
In a 2017 interview with Michael Billington, Brooke spoke of the importance of “swimming against the current and achieving what we can in our chosen field. Fate has decided that mine is that of the theater and within that I have a responsibility to be as positive and creative as possible. To give vent to despair is the ultimate salvation.”
Brooke married actor Natasha Parry in 1951 and they had two children, Irina and Simon, who both became theater directors. Parry died in 2015.
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