Peter Brook

Performance Skills-Introduction Peter Brook Peter Brook was born in London in 1925. Throughout his career, he has distinguished himself in the genres of theatre, opera, film and writing. He has directed many Shakespeare productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, including "Love's Labour's Lost" (1946), "Measure for Measure" (1950), "Titus Andronicus" (1955), "King Lear" (1962) and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1970). In Paris, in 1971, Brook founded the International Centre for Theatre Research (C.I.R.T), which in turn became the International Centre for Theatre Creations (C.I.C.T) when he opened its permanent base - the Bouffes du Nord Theatre. His productions are notable for their iconoclastic nature and scope: Marat/Sade, Timon of Athens, The Iks, Ubu aux Bouffes, Conference of the Birds, L'Os, The Cherry Orchard, Tragedy of Carmen, The Mahabharata, Woza Albert!, The Tempest, Impressions of Pelleas, The Man Who, Qui est là?, Happy Days, Je suis un phénomène, Le Costume, The Tragedy of Hamlet and Far Away. Many of these have been performed both in French and English. He has directed the operas of La Bohème, Boris Godounov, The Olympians, Salomé and Le Nozze de Figaro at Covent Garden Opera House, London; Faust and Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City and Don Giovanni for the Aix en Provence Festival. His films include Lord of the Flies (1963), Marat/Sade (1967), King Lear (1971), Seven Days... Seven Nights (1960), The Mahabharata (1989) and Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979). Brook's autobiography, Threads of Time, was published in 1998 and joins other titles, including The Empty Space (1968), (translated into over 15 languages), The Shifting Point (1987) and There Are No Secrets (1993). He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1965 Queen's Honours List and a CH (Companion of Honour) in the 1998 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to Drama. He was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award: The Times Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Theatre in 1994 (1993 season). ! THERE IS no doubt that a theatre can be a very special place. It is like a magnifying glass, and also like a reducing lens. (The Empty Space) The uniqueness of the function [of theatre] is that it offers something that cannot be found in the street, at home, in the pub, with friends, or on a psychiatrist’s couch; in a church or at the movies. There is only one interesting difference between the cinema and the theatre. The cinema flashes on to a screen images from the past. As this is what the mind does to itself all through life, the cinema seems intimately real. Of course, it is nothing of the sort—it is a satisfying and enjoyable extension of the unreality of everyday perception. The theatre, on the other hand, always asserts itself in the present. This is what can make it more real than the normal stream of consciousness. This also is what can make it so disturbing. (Brook, 1996, p. 122). The closer the actor approaches the task of performing, the more requirements he is asked to separate, understand and fulfil simultaneously. He must bring into being an unconscious state of which he is completely in charge. The result is a whole, indivisible—but emotion is continually illuminated by intuitive intelligence so that the spectator, though wooed, assaulted, alienated and forced to reassess, ends by experiencing something equally indivisible. Catharsis can never have been simply an emotional purge: it must have been an appeal to the whole man. (Brook, 1996, p. 157) The one thing that distinguishes the theatre from all the other arts is that it has no permanence. Yet it is very easy to apply—almost from force of critical habit —permanent standards and general rules to this ephemeral phenomenon. (Brook, 1996, p. 160) And the demand is that having got there, into the auditorium, one has to have for a moment an experience that is different from the experience in the street and which makes one feel, for a second, that one is closer to the truth. […] There’s an experience which no-one can get by thought or by argument. It can't exist on television, it can't exist on film, both of which give other experiences. This is something which can only exist because a group of people are living something together. (National Theatre on Peter Brook) What is the point of playing games/! doing exercises ! during rehearsals? ! In a reaction to Realism, some artists like Peter Brook or the Living Theatre, de-emphasised the realism of theatre. Instead, they preferred to emphasise the communication between the actors and the audience. This focus, summed up in Antonin Artaud’s phrase “Theatre of Cruelty,” was directed at eliciting the greatest emotional reaction from audience members. In other words, make them squirm uncomfortably in their seats. Some of these directing exercises show this change in focus, as they try to get actors to go beyond the “text,” expressing emotions much more physically.