With his work “The Empty Room” from 1969, he was considered one of the innovators of the theater, his productions were groundbreaking for the 20th century: Peter Brook. The day before yesterday, the native Briton died in his adopted country of France at the age of 97.
His theses about the “empty space” were a declaration of war on the bourgeois theater. For a play, a bare space, crossed by one man while another looks on, is enough. Brook implemented these ideas in 1970, for example, with a legendary acrobatic Shakespeare production. The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in a pure white, cubic room with trapezes is still considered to be formative for theater makers.
Too radical for the Royal Opera
Brook was born on March 21, 1925 as the son of Jewish emigrants from Russia in London. At the age of ten he performed “Hamlet” at home with cardboard figures, at 18 he brought “Dr. Faustus” to a London pub stage. In his early 20s, he was considered a child prodigy. He staged Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1947 at the age of 22 he became production manager at the London Royal Opera. There he directed Richard Strauss’s “Salome” in 1950. Salvador Dali created such daring stage designs that Brook was fired afterwards.
Comedies and musicals then made him the star of London’s West End. He worked i.a. with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Brook tried everything — by his own admission, “culture, sex, drugs, religions” — before marrying actress Natasha Parry in 1951, with whom he dated until her death in 2015.
Nine Hour Epic performed
In 1974 Brook moved to Paris. There he founded the International Center for Theater Research to research both African and Eastern traditions. The international troupe found a home in the former variety theater Theater des Bouffes du Nord. Already in 1971 he had developed his theater language “Orghast”. It consists of words that the actors charge with immediate expression and thus evoke a spontaneous imagination in the audience.
In the decades that followed, his productions became smaller and more international. With one exception: in 1985 he adapted the Sanskrit epic “Mahabharata” as a nine-hour premiere. Peter Brook worked on productions until the very end.
Source: Nachrichten
