Never meet your heroes, the saying goes. When I first encountered Peter Brook, in 2010, he was not so much hero as legend: guru, shaman, magus, maestro. He was frail – tiny, too, shuffling into the theatre in enormous, thick-soled white shoes. But the moment he trained his famous ice-water-blue gaze on you, it was clear his mind was made of steel.
Reputation does funny things to people; especially in theatre, an artform given to myth-making, where stories about famous shows you didn’t happen to see expand with the telling. I’m decades too young, for instance, to have witnessed seen any of Brook’s early or middle-period work, the sprawling spectacles of La Conférence des Oiseaux or The Mahabharata. The director I encountered was the late minimalist, the polisher of parable-like pieces that gleamed like pebbles beneath the surface of a river. Often they were cryptic, sometimes downright puzzling. But Brook’s ability to conjure a gleaming theatrical image – collaborating since the mid-1970s with his trusted lieutenant, Marie-Hélène Estienne – was unparalleled. I recall the actor William Nadylam in The Suit whisking a handkerchief from a pocket and turning it into a tablecloth, voilà, just like that. Then there was an evening of Beckett shorts with Marcello Magni, Khalifa Natour and Kathryn Hunter. I’m able not just to picture it in my mind but to almost replay it, so piercing was its clarity.
