Peter Brook

Peter Brook (born March 21, 1925, London, England—died July 2, 2022, Paris, France) was an English producer-director of Shakespeare’s plays whose daring productions of other dramatists’ works contributed significantly to the development of the 20th century’s avant-garde stage.

Attaining at an early age the status of one of the foremost British directors, Brook directed his first Shakespeare play, King John, in 1945 for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. He also introduced to England the avant-garde plays of Jean Cocteau (The Infernal Machine, performed 1945) and of Jean-Paul Sartre (Vicious Circle [No Exit], performed 1946; The Respectable Prostitute and Men Without Shadows, both performed 1947). In 1948 and 1949, for the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London, he directed several productions, notably Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, with costumes and set designs by Salvador Dalí. Thereafter he continued to present Shakespeare’s plays, always with a fresh and inventive approach, as well as those of many contemporary playwrights. These included Measure for Measure (1950), The Winter’s Tale (1951), Titus Andronicus (1955), Hamlet (1955), The Tempest (1957), and King Lear (1962). Toward the end of that period, he also began to examine the theatre of provocation, and, influenced by Antonin Artaud’s tenets of the Theatre of Cruelty, he produced Jean Genet’s Le Balcon (produced 1960, in Paris; The Balcony) and The Screens (1964), as well as Peter Weiss’s sensational play Marat/Sade (1964), as it is commonly called, the unconventional style and staging of which shocked the theatre world and won Brook international fame. He gained further renown by directing a 1967 film version of the play.

The following year Brook directed Seneca’s Oedipus and published The Empty Space, which put forth his ideas on theatre. One of those ideas, the belief that the director is a play’s chief creative force, influenced him to adopt some of the innovative techniques advocated by the experimental Polish director Jerzy Grotowski and the American director Julian Beck, cofounder of The Living Theatre. In search of freedom to pursue less commercial aspects of theatre, he moved in 1970 to Paris, where he established the International Centre of Theatre Research. There he worked with associates at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord to answer some essential questions about the nature of theatre and to attempt to determine an interdisciplinary, “intercultural” language of theatre.

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Among his later theatrical productions, which were mostly performed in Paris, are Peter Handke’s Kaspar (1972); Timon of Athens (1974); Ubu aux Bouffes (1977; “Ubu with Bouffes [the theatre company]”), an adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (“King Ubu”); Antony and Cleopatra (1978); an epic nine-hour stage adaptation based on an ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharata (1985, film 1989); Woza Albert! (1989); and The Tempest (1990). Brook also wrote the screenplay for and directed such films as The Lord of the Flies (1963), King Lear (1971), Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), and Swann in Love (1984). In two books, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration, 1946–1987 (1987) and The Open Door (1993), Brook extended his continuing reflections on aspects of the theatre. In 1997 he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale for theatre/film. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1998. That same year he published a memoir, Threads of Time. In 2002 he directed a BBC television production of Hamlet. In 2016 Brook (with his frequent collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne and writer Jean-Claude Carrière) produced Battlefield, a sequel to his 1985 production of The Mahabharata; it traveled to France, Japan, and Singapore before being staged in Mumbai. He and Estienne later wrote and directed the play Why? (produced 2019), which examines the purpose of theatre.