Peter Brook worked in London, New York and Paris, where he died on Saturday. Brook will go down in history as a theater legend. Experimenting was second nature to him.
–
British theater director Peter Brook died on Saturday at the age of 97 in Paris. He is considered the best, the most creative and also the most controversial stage director of the 21st century. Something that earned him several Emmys and Tonys over the course of his career.
His career spanned nearly eight decades. He was active in various disciplines: opera, theatre, musical, film and television. He performed works by TS Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Shakespeare, but never just like that. He will go down in history as someone who questioned all conventions, broke boundaries and was not afraid of an experimental approach. The grand old enfant terrible from the British stages, to put it in the words of the BBC. He once called post-war British theater “old-fashioned and stereotypical and run by a handful of conservatives who performed Shakespeare in the dullest way imaginable.”
Trapezes and Sanskrit
He was born in West London, the son of Jewish immigrants. He studied theater and was soon spotted as a unique talent. He was barely twenty when he became head of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Still on his curriculum are the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Opera House in England, and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
In the 1970s he moved to Paris. There he became head of the Parisian theater Les Bouffes du Nord, where he created monumental plays with actors from different cultures. The Mahabharata, for example, a nine-hour epic of Hindu mythology in Sanskrit; it was not universally applauded. The conference of the birds he in turn inspired a medieval Persian poem. In front of A midsummer night’s dream he took trapezes on the podium. for Strauss’ Salome were the sets by Salvador Dali. His last piece dates from barely five years ago: The prisoner† He was 92 at the time.
In an interview with Theaterkrant he summarized his vision on theater in 2018: ‘Theatre must be useful. It’s useless for me to talk and for you to write unless we think what we’re doing is ultimately useful to someone. The goal is to be part of a global movement of people who want to be useful in their field of work.’
–
