The writer Jean-Claude Carriere, a regular collaborator with Peter Brook, said of the director: “Peter has a very strong presence, but what strikes me is his lightness.” Others also have corrected a received image, particularly of the later Brook, as some austere Gurdjieff-inspired autocrat (“Gurus take themselves too seriously” was Brook’s perspective).
For some more empirical Anglo-Saxon theatre critics, often uneasy outside text-based theatre, Brook’s explorations (his recherche theatrale at Paris’s Bouffes du Nord theatre, the base for most of his work since 1970) were quasi-mystical, even humourlessly narcissistic.
