There are four forms of theatre, wrote Peter Brook in the 1960s in his essay “The Empty Room”: the conventional, which he considered deadly, the sacred, which adheres to rituals and is therefore likely to survive, the popular, coarse and the immediate. He liked that best. Because, and with this definition he became famous, important, quoted a hundred thousand times: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks through the space while another looks on; that is all that is necessary for theatrical action is.”
This room is really empty now. Nobody comes there anymore. Peter Brook, born on March 21, 1925 in London as the son of Jewish immigrants from Latvia, is dead. As the French news agency AFP reported on Sunday, citing Brooks’ private environment, he died at the age of 97 on Saturday in Paris, where he lived since the 1970s.
There are countless theatrical performances, many films that would never have been made without Brook and his focus on the essentials. A single, singular example that comes to mind: Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” can be understood as a direct adaptation of Brooks’ essay into the film. Perhaps the importance of the theater maker, theater thinker and theater performer Brook became so legendary that many refer to him without ever having seen anything of him. But “The Empty Room” was for a very long time required reading for everyone who is intellectually involved with theatre. This is perhaps no longer the case today, simply because a man is walking through the room here. Today at least half a dozen very different people would have to go through this one.
Monolithic masterpieces: from the Shoah drama to the man who mistook his wife for a hat
In 1943 Brook directed his first “Faust” (after Marlowe), when he was still studying. A few years later he attracted attention as a director, worked in Birmingham and Stratford-upon-Avon, became production manager at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in London and staged “Boris Godunow”, “La Bohème” and also a “Salome”. pictures of Salvador Dalí on the stage. In the 1950s he worked mainly in Belgium, Great Britain and Paris. In 1951 he toured Germany with the Stratforder Ensemble and presented his legendary production of Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure”.
Nobody knows anymore, nobody needs to know anymore, because afterwards he delivered monolithic masterpieces of theatrical art. The first: The staging of the Shoah docudrama “The Investigation” by Peter Weiss, as well as his cleverly reflecting revolutionary drama “Marat/Sade”, that was in the mid-1960s at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, and a film adaptation of “Marat” followed. He had previously filmed William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies”. Since the beginning of his theater and film work, Brook has chosen texts that interfere with social life and take a stand, such as the Vietnam collage “Us” about a year after the “investigation”. He later brought another contemporary, socially critical piece with “Woza Albert!” against apartheid in South Africa (1989). But these more day-to-day political commitments remained the exception in his work, which traced the foundations, the memory of theater and society. The urge of today’s theater to stuff the stages with everyday life, activism and apparently realistic aesthetics has probably become alien to it. As early as 1970 he said goodbye to conventional theater with a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
That year he founded the Center International de Recherche Théâtrale (CIRT) in Paris, which became the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in 1974, which he directed until 2010. This is also where his last premiere came out, on April 21, 2022, the “Tempest Project”, directed by him and Marie-Hélène Estienne. From this slightly decaying theater at the Gare du Nord in Paris, Brook continued to tour the world with his fantastic productions. From around 1993 onwards with “L’homme qui”, a “Recherche théâtrale” in the head of man, who of course never stays in his head, but lives on stage with a realism that only Brook could invent life on stage. The work was based on Oliver Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistaken for a Hat for His Wife. He also went on tours with music theater, such as “Carmen”, which lasted 80 minutes; the world tours worked because Brooks’ works, with their reduced but precisely applied repertoire of gestures, with their love for humanity, which transcended language, could be understood everywhere.
Peter Brook made humanitarian theater, beyond all discourses
If necessary, he did not go out into the world from Central Europe, but chose the opposite path: Inspired by the idea of a world culture, Brook, after ten years of preparation, brought his dramatization of the Sanskrit epic “Le Mahabharata” to the Avignon Theater Festival in 1985, which was adapted from the Indian version of the prehistory of mankind was shown by English broadcaster Channel 4 in December 1989. A film epic that condenses ten hours of theater into three hours of film, with a cast from all over the world – perhaps the greatest artistic expression of Brooks’ global approach to theater.
Brooke was Commander of the Order of the British Empire, member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, officer and commander of the Legion of Honour. He was the recipient of the European Theater Prize (1989), the Dan David Prize (worth one million US dollars) (2005) and the International Ibsen Prize (2008). In 2019, Brook was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize for Art in the Arts category.
Nothing important in hindsight. It is important to remember his productions, all of which, even the most important, are impossible to deal with here. One remembers a guest performance at the Ruhr Festival in Recklinghausen three years ago, “The Prisoner”. The parable, which isn’t one, lasts an hour, the parable that overcomes everything parable by the presence of the people. Here you could feel: Peter Brook makes humanitarian theater that goes beyond all discourses of the city and state theater. That is always valid.