In 1979, Peter Brook made a film of Gurdjieff’s book Meetings With Remarkable Men. I was lucky enough to have countless meetings with the remarkable man that was Brook: there were newspaper interviews, radio programmes, public encounters at Manchester’s Royal Exchange and London’s National Film Theatre, private chats at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris. You might have thought that repetition and staleness would set in. But every meeting with Brook was, for me at least, fresh and invigorating.
What struck me most about Brook? As you might expect from the great pathfinder of modern theatre, his boundless curiosity. That took many forms. He was always fascinated, for a start, by the mechanics of interviewing. He wanted to know how the tape recorder worked, who operated the green light in the radio studio, how I would transmit a written interview.
