I was 19 when I saw Peter Brook’s production of King Lear in 1962 and I felt like Berlioz seeing Hamlet: “The lightning flash of that discovery revealed to me at a stroke the whole heaven of art. I saw, I understood, I felt that I was alive and that I must arise and walk.” The production was on an almost bare stage, stripped of what Brook described as the “quincaillerie” (ironmongery) of stage production that had so fascinated him as an absurdly young director of theatre and opera. The play was revealed in its elemental force, a world without moral absolutes in a permanent condition of fallibility.
Peter was a universally revered director, admired as much for his genius as for his ability to reinvent himself. When I began directing, I wrote to him and to my astonishment he invited me to come to his home where, although I was thoroughly and obviously ignorant and starstruck, he spoke with unforced charm and great clarity, without ever talking down to me: how plays were revealed during rehearsals, not mapped out beforehand; how rehearsals must be a journey; how there was no such thing as a definitive production; of magic, of instinct, of showmanship. He was by turns grave, impish and passionate.
