Peter Brook, one of the most original and influential theatre directors of the 20th century, who has died aged 97, was a questioner all his life. He disliked being called a guru, because the term implied lazy pupils and received solutions. He did not consider himself an artist, or an ideologue; but he was certainly a teacher, and for many an exemplar. He explored the interior world of the self and the nature of reality in dramas of every description – Shakespeare, opera, Asian epic and invented language – on stages and spaces all over the Earth. Literally the earth on many occasions: in a thyme-scented quarry south of Avignon in France, in the villages of west Africa and the deserts of Iran.
His own guide into that interior world of reality was the early 20th-century mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and his chosen medium of transmission the ancient temple of entertainment, civic healing and personal truthfulness: the theatre. How the pilgrimage and the medium came together, at a time when theatre was commonly seen to be retreating on all fronts, was the story of Brook’s life. No one did more to take drama out of the conventional auditorium and kindle it wherever performers and spectators could meet to share an “empty space” – the title of his most influential book, published in 1968.
