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.
He was also endlessly inquisitive about the state of British theatre. He always wanted to hear about the latest productions and was especially keen to learn about the RSC. The last I heard from him was in response to a piece I wrote about the future of the company where I floated the idea that it might be time for an actor take the helm. I got an email from Brook’s sister-in-law, Nina Soufy, who said that Peter had seen the piece and was broadly supportive.
Something else I took from our interviews was Brook’s agreement with my thesis that the neat division of his career into two phases, following his move to Paris in 1970, was artificial. I have long maintained that Brook’s quest for greater simplicity was visible in shows such as his 1957 Stratford Tempest and his 1958 musical Irma la Douce. Equally his love of theatrical magic informed his work at the Bouffes du Nord. But Brook himself in an interview we did in Manchester in 1994 revealed that for him the real change in his approach came with the Theatre of Cruelty season staged at Lamda in 1964. He told me that previously he had always been forced to work in a fixed time-frame and deliver a result.
That Artaud-inspired season gave him the freedom, for the first time in his career, to experiment, although it did yield a public performance and fed into his production of the Marat/Sade. If there is a division in Brook’s life and work, I suspect it comes from the shaman/showman antithesis which I coined many years ago and which has been much repeated. It’s a neat pun but I feel slightly guilty about it since a shaman is a priest who claims to communicate with gods. Brook made no such claim: he was simply a director, as he once told me, “penetrating into human questions through human material”.
If Brook was on a permanent quest, he never lost the instinct of the showman. I once asked him why in his starkly austere production of La Tragédie de Carmen he introduced a blast of sumptuously recorded Bizet just before the climax. “Well,” he said, “an audience always needs a lift four-fifths of the way through a show.”
The best example of his showmanship, however, came when I saw his production of The Mahabharata in Zurich in 1987. The evening began with a speech by Brook in which he cheekily told the audience: “We’re going to spend the night together.” I’d never known Brook preface his show with an intro and I wondered why he had done it. I had my answer some 11 hours later when, as this epic of death and destruction ended on a note of healing harmony, the back wall of the theatre parted to reveal the dawn sunlight dancing on the waters of Lake Zurich. Brook had timed everything to perfection so that, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, he seemed to have nature itself at his command.
