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A Prospero for our time

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  • A Prospero for our time

    Guardian, UK

    Arts and entertainment

    A Prospero for our time

    Michael Kustow's biography charts Peter Brook's transformation from
    precocious master to itinerant sage. Simon Callow pays homage

    Saturday April 2, 2005
    The Guardian


    Buy Peter Brook at the Guardian bookshop

    Peter Brook: A Biography
    by Michael Kustow
    352pp, Bloomsbury, £25

    In the spring of 1970, from my peep-hole in the box office of the Aldwych, I
    glimpsed the thoughtful faces of the associate directors of the RSC as they
    returned to London from Stratford for one of their regular meetings. They
    had just seen the first night of Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer
    Night's Dream . As they filed past on their way to the office upstairs, they
    were uncharacteristically quiet. They knew that Brook had done it again:
    moved the goal-posts for Shakespearean production, in the process redefining
    himself as a director, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and to some extent the
    theatre itself. In his work with the actors he had set out to discover what
    he called "the secret play", ignoring any realistic pointers in the text,
    banishing every traditional context in which the play had ever been
    performed, rejoicing in circus skills and crude music-hall gags while, at
    the same time, sounding the soaring lyricism of the verse at full throttle.
    Mendelssohn's wedding march blasted out of the loudspeakers and the nature
    of Titania's attraction to her donkey lover was made absolutely clear. In
    its white box of a set, all the play's lewd energy, its beauty, its darkness
    and its light, and, unforgettably, its power to heal, were released.

    It was the last piece of theatre Brook created as a resident of this
    country. For the subsequent 35 years of his life, he has roamed the globe
    from his base in Paris, seeking to redefine theatrical truth, aiming for a
    form of story-telling that transcends national cultures to tap into the
    universal. In the course of these often far-flung journeys - both
    geographical and artistic - he has delivered some of the key productions of
    the late 20th century, providing a continuous challenge to theatrical
    practice. He is widely acknowledged as the greatest theatre director in the
    world today, though there are those who feel that his supreme talent, his
    genius, has been misapplied, leading the theatre not closer to its true
    function but in the opposite direction, into aestheticism and mysticism.

    There are also those who feel that he has betrayed, or at least walked away
    from, his particular talent. Kenneth Tynan, in his diary (not quoted in
    Michael Kustow's authorised biography), cries: "How I wish Peter would stop
    tackling huge philosophical issues and return to the thing he can do better
    than any other English director: startle us with stage magic." He has been
    at the heart of the often furious debate about the purpose of the theatre.
    It is Kustow's aim in this indispensable book to trace the trajectory of
    Brook's crucial contribution to the discussion, both in his writings and in
    his productions. He succeeds brilliantly, and I defy anyone to read the book
    and not come away thinking better of the theatre, its scope, its passion,
    its contribution.

    Kustow has had access first of all to Brook himself, an elusive interviewee,
    and to a fascinating correspondence with his childhood friend Stephen Facey,
    both of which illuminate the narrative. The book is chastely free of gossip
    and often omits some of the human mess that accompanies experiment of any
    sort, including some of the crises that Brook himself records in his
    autobiography Threads of Time .

    The Brook whom Kustow presents to us, though altogether exceptional, is not
    especially complex. His early life was one of material comfort, intellectual
    stimulation and constant encouragement, although as the son of Russian Jews,
    he was conscious of being different from his fellow students at public
    school. He was blessed with a relationship with his father that was wholly
    positive, as a result of which, he says, he knew nothing "of the rejection
    of the father figure that is so much part of our time". His intellectual
    precocity was encouraged (he read War and Peace at the age of nine) but not
    unduly spotlit; he knew his worth.

    There is no hint of neurosis about him. Wholly lacking in the Englishman's
    habitual instinct of apologising for his very existence, he took to the
    theatre with easy and instant mastery. While at Oxford, he directed Doctor
    Faustus , tracking down the aged Aleister Crowley to advise on the magic,
    thinking nothing of consorting with "the wickedest man in England". In the
    absence of women he plunged with comfortable sensuality into "every
    homosexual affair I could", until finally deciding, as he character
    istically puts it, that female genitals were more congenial to him than
    male. No sooner had he come down from Oxford than he directed a production
    of Cocteau's Infernal Machine , hopping over to Paris for a chat with the
    author. He was swiftly taken up by Willie Armstrong of the Liverpool Rep and
    Barry Jackson of Birmingham, where he first worked with Paul Scofield. He
    was not yet 21. He then went to Stratford with Jackson and Scofield with a
    striking Watteau-inspired Love's Labours Lost; he became ballet
    correspondent for the Observer, and - at his own suggestion - director of
    productions at the Royal Opera House, directing a fine Boris Godunov , (in
    the repertory until the 1980s), and a Salomé designed by Salvador Dalí
    (which proved one provocation too many). He was now 23. And so it went on,
    an unrelenting crescendo of success in the West End, at Stratford, in
    France, on Broadway, at the Metropolitan Opera House, across the whole
    spectrum of the theatre of the 1950s; he was unstoppable.

    "For my first 30 years," Brook says, "I had nothing to connect with the
    phrase 'inner life'. What was 'inner life'? There was life. Everything was
    100% extrovert." At some point during this period, he came upon the writings
    of Peter Damian Ouspensky and, through him, the teaching of the Armenian
    avatar Gurdjieff, finding in it a view of the universe which accorded with
    his own understanding of himself, one based on a concept of life as the
    constant interplay of energies in which human personality often stood as an
    obstacle to experience of the real world. He absorbed this teaching into his
    life, submitting to its exercises and to the tough challenges of a teacher
    who persuaded him of "my own essen tial ordinariness". Kustow says of this
    commitment: "Brook was seeking to master the maelstrom of his life.
    Gurdjieff promised him a way through his hothouse of emotions. He gave him a
    map of his desires."

    By his mid-30s he started to want to break out of the theatre of which he
    himself had been such a supreme exponent. He had always held himself
    separate from his contemporaries, standing outside the mainstream post-war
    British tradition of his generation - the rep, the university (he had
    fastidiously refrained from joining the Oxford University Dramatic Society),
    the socialist movement, and he regarded the Royal Court revolution as narrow
    and insular. He now permanently renounced the boulevard, joining Peter
    Hall's new Royal Shakespeare Company, though not without misgivings that it
    was merely intending "to do good things very well, the traditional target of
    liberal England". If he was to be part of it, he must have his own
    experimental studio. His work there, inspired by Antonin Artaud's notion of
    the Theatre of Cruelty, pushed and probed into the extremes of experience
    and expression, culminating in his overwhelming account of Peter Weiss'
    Marat/Sade, a tour-de-force of staging as well as perhaps the most advanced
    instance of company work ever seen in England. A Midsummer Night's Dream was
    like an enormous whoop of joy after this sustained exploration of the dark.

    Aged 40, he suddenly told his friend Facey that he now wanted "to face
    inwards rather than outwards". It is of the subsequent years that Kustow
    writes most brilliantly. The book warms up enormously as it goes on - as if
    the early Brook, the bobby dazzler, was a little alien to Kustow, who
    documents his young stardom conscientiously but without enthusiasm. It is
    the later search that grips Kustow, the quest for new forms, new language,
    new relationships with unimagined audiences: the company at the Bouffes du
    Nord; the treks to Africa; the engagement with epic texts from ancient
    cultures. Sometimes Brook would assert his genius for staging - would for a
    moment become again, as Richard Findlater put it after Orghast at
    Persepolis, "the arch-magician, a self-renewing Prospero, with enough of
    Puck in him to change his staff in time before it is snapped by theory" -
    but much of his work was directed towards defining a new kind of acting:
    "effortless transparency, an organic presence beyond self, mind or body such
    as great musicians attain when they pass beyond virtuosity". The work he
    produced under this dispensation has been often ravishing, illuminating,
    provocative; it has also often been somewhat mild in its effect. There would
    have been no place for an Olivier or a Scofield in these productions.

    The "hell of night and darkness" that Kustow discerns in Brook's early and
    middle work seems to have dissolved, along with the "deeply rooted
    aggression and anguish" in his psyche. Perhaps it is not so much that they
    were within him, as that he had an exceptional ability to be the conduit of
    what was around him. Now, in his 80s, he seems less engaged, quite
    understandably, with the world about him, and more concerned with distilling
    the essentials of what he conceives theatre - and man - to be.

    In the 1960s, Brook had demanded a neo-Elizabethan theatre "which passes
    from the world of action to the world of thought, from down-to-earth reality
    to the extreme of metaphysical enquiry without effort and without
    self-consciousness". This is what we all long for; alas, Brook's own work
    since he formulated the demand has not been able to satisfy it. He has gone
    for something quite different. But his has been a unique and a necessary
    voice, reminding us that the price of a theatre that is truly alive is
    perpetual vigilance.

    · Simon Callow's Shooting the Actor is published by Vintage.
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