Adrian Lester: “Peter saw theater as a continuous investigation”
I’ve never seen a director reject so many brilliant ideas because they didn’t quite fit what he wanted the audience to feel. Peter always reduced things to their simplest, most honest form. He was soft spoken, very gentle, incredibly perceptive. His observation was the best I knew.
Some principals will tell you what to do: stand here, go there, sit. This is the most basic type of approach like traffic targeting. Others will tell you how to say what you say. But Peter directed your thoughts. He didn’t care so much about how you sounded or how you moved, he cared about what you meant. You have always been left digging into the deeper parts of yourself. When you’re making a play with him, you really don’t know where his work ends and yours begins. I felt like you were completely free on stage.
When we first worked together on Hamlet, it was just me and him in a rehearsal room for a week. We would go through Hamlet’s soliloquies chronologically and he would sit very close to me, both of us on the floor – even the strain of standing up was removed. We split the speeches and it became clear to me that “to be or not to be” was in the wrong place. It was the speech of a man caught in a predicament that twisted his mind and soul so much that he wondered if life was worth living. Peter has moved it to the point where Hamlet has killed Polonius and disposed of the body, and in our version he runs into Ophelia on the stage and she takes the widest place around him. You see Hamlet realizes what he has done. It also sets you up for the next time you see Ophelia, when she’s distraught and handing out the flowers: she knows the man she loves killed her father.
Peter wanted to remove what he considered unnecessary – he removed Hamlet’s political drama and wanted to concentrate on the domestic: mother, brother, father, son, uncle, friend. He meaningfully called it The Tragedy of Hamlet. It went straight through, two and a half hours without an interval, so it was a test for the audience as well.
‘He always played down things’… Adrian Lester in rehearsals for Hamlet at the Bouffes du Nord, 2000. Photo: Jean-Pierre Muller/EPA
Sometimes Peter dismissed an idea, saying “It’s an opera” or “It’s a movie.” He always pursued what was deeply theatrical and brought into Western theater elements of performance that are older than ours, such as those from Africa and Japan.
Always very loyal, he had a group of actors that he returned to again and again because they had certain qualities that he wanted to use. We were amazed that in our play of Hamlet the actor Yoshi Oida came in during rehearsals and played with us for a while, and that Akram Khan also came in. Having a new person who was brilliant in their field and would just do a moment on stage for us changed the whole play and made it fresh.
Theater Bouffes du Nord in Paris [a dilapidated music hall reopened by Brook in 1974] is a beautiful space. You can see similar “rough magic” introduced in new theaters today. In older buildings, designers will raise the seats, push the stage back, and allow the audience to actually look at the actors—all to enhance the effect that you’re all together in the same space.
For Peter, the theater was a never-ending study. Even in the final performance of Hamlet and in the film, we were still searching. Audiences can sense when a comedian is confident – and then they’ll laugh. But if they feel at any point that the comedian is worried or out of shape, then they won’t laugh. It’s a sixth sense. In theater, and especially with Hamlet, you have to revise these lines, bars, and questions every time. Sometimes you may come up with a slightly different answer than the night before. If you do it right, the audience will feel it and know that you are not just going through the script.
If your ultimate goal as an actor is that you want as many people as possible to watch you, then that’s fine, go do something. But we have a greater role – every musician, dancer, singer and actor – and that is to hold a mirror up to society. At one point, Peter said that if Hamlet was a good play, we wouldn’t be doing it 400 years later. Its longevity is a testament to the perfect questions it seems to ask about our darker nature. It doesn’t have to be well packed; it should make you uncomfortable. It is this understanding of Hamlet that led me years later to understand why I would go on stage and play Othello.
Peter understood that a play has the greatest power in the minds of the audience and that what an actor does is use words to indicate meaning. This meaning is not a conclusion they have already arrived at and which they themselves deliver. Peter has always been about the ethereal, with plays that ask big questions about who we are and who we think we are. Not plays that start, middle and end, but plays that make you think about your own life on the journey home. CW
Speechless… Vivien Leigh as Lavinia in Titus Andronicus at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955. Photo: AP
Janet Suzman: “He made myth flesh forever”
“Blinking ice spikes.” Trust Kenneth Tynan to find the perfect phrase to describe Peter Brook’s blue, searching, searching eyes. Their search has ended now, after 97 years, leaving such a huge legacy that I can only choose here to recall a few stunning images.
Titus Andronicus at Stratford in the late 1950s…a figure appears slowly from the left, both of her outstretched wrists painfully extended, showing a shocking cascade of scarlet ribbons falling from them, not a hair out of place on her graceful head, nor tearing her beautiful dress, only a thin trickle of blood from her perfect mouth opened in a silent scream. The gasp from the house I can still hear now that Vivien Leigh’s Lavinia was revealed, raped and mutilated and speechless, but without the display of blood or tears or the mess of realism.
Another indelible memory: Paul Scofield’s devastated face as Lear in black-and-white close-up, the closest I’ve ever seen, to Brooke’s haunting film. Scofield was that rarest of stars who gave the impression of endless interior landscapes behind his dark eyes; Lear without these hinterlands is an annoyingly wayward and hot-tempered old party. Brooke’s film of Lear is a dark poem of misunderstanding and enlightenment, and it is brilliant.
Third photo: It’s 1971 and under a blue-black Persian sky with diamond stars sits the happy, happy audience that gets to watch Brook’s Orghast perform at Persepolis. Fifty feet above us, a huge ball of fire, blazing like the sun, slowly descends, its orange flames flickering over the ancient bas-reliefs that adorn the tomb of Darius. Beneath this flaming orb, a stocky man stares in wonder, holding aloft a huge, gleaming brass plate in which the orb will delicately settle—the myth of the flaming Prometheus made flesh.
I thank him for these unforgettable things—those and many more—and for the best and shortest note any director ever gave an actor when I was rehearsing Cleopatra’s dress. It doesn’t matter what it was, but I’m forever grateful for the insight behind those naughty ice spikes.
‘Infinitely more intense’… Glenda Jackson as Cleopatra at the RSC in Stratford in 1978. Photo: Donald Cooper/Alamy
Glenda Jackson: ‘He always demanded the truth’
He was the greatest director the world has ever seen! Here is this person who is constantly looking for something essentially true and accessible to the audience. Nothing was taken for granted and he never took himself for granted – if he was going in the wrong direction he would stop him and put us back on another path. Wherever he went, he was always open to cultures other than our own. His work was extraordinary and inspiring because he learned from these cultures.
In Antony and Cleopatra [starring Jackson and Alan Howard at the RSC in 1978] he made the shadowy areas of the play much clearer. Before, she had to have a majestic quality because she was Queen of Egypt, but that wasn’t his approach at all. It was infinitely more intense. He saw the other characters as people who live and work together 24/7, 365 days a year—people who know each other inside out. It brought a different dimension to it.
I visited him several times at Bouffes du Nord. It always felt like you were going to see the audience being taken to a different place. It’s a shambles there, but whatever was going on on stage, you were in that world, not a shoddy theater.
He changed the theater by always demanding the truth – without ever using those words. He didn’t hang around: if you went the wrong way, you would be told in no uncertain terms. He always felt there was something to discover – and he was an absolute genius at helping you discover it. CW
Use your imagination… Frances de la Tour as Helena, with Ben Kingsley as Demetrius, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970. Photo: Donald Cooper/Alamy
Francis de la Tour: “Whatever you do, don’t act!”
The empty space is a thin book, but it says it all: someone walks on stage, someone watches, and this is the beginning of the theater. And whatever you do, “Don’t act,” Peter would say. Quite a lot to ask. This is the imperative question: Can you do this without acting? Just use your imagination.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a very physical production in a way that no one had seen before. And not just trapeze work. We rotated around the stage, with Shakespeare’s lines always a staple. You can’t jump on someone and not come out with the verse too – that was the point of the jump, to do this incredible physical work and speak Shakespeare at the same time. At rehearsal we sat in a circle…
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