Brook

Peter Brook was a director and theatre practitioner born in the 1920s who had a hugely influential style in the 20th century avant-garde movement (and has inspired others such as Alexander Zeldin, director of The Other Place amongst other plays) that was inspired by many different practitioners before him. His main doctrine was the ability of theatre to be performed anywhere. When someone watches someone walk across an empty space, that is an audience watching an actor on a stage, and hence theatre is created - it is organic, improvisational and imaginative. This led to his minimalist design so that the audience only focuses on the actor and has to use their imagination. His interpretations of plays are unorthodox and asks the audience to imagine themselves. Similarly to Grotowski, his style also focused on physical theatre to tell stories, like mime, clowning, ensemble and non-Western performance styles.

Artaud's theatre of cruelty and the way it uses physical communication through all five senses is worked into Brook's work, and also showed how theatre could be stripped to its essence. Grotowski was a very similar practitioner that he drew inspiration from too, who again focused on physical theatre and emphasised the importance of the actor and their relationship with the audience. He also used Copeau's ideas of a focus on the actor's body and other mime techniques to hone this physical aspect of his theatre, making everything very high energy and often humorous. His timeless stories with universal themes were often drawn from Shakespeare and other non-Western traditional theatre, that tell stories of deeply human experiences and emotions. Finally, Brook also wanted his actors and ensembles to have a large impact on the final product so often used their ideas in the pieces.

One of Brook's famous productions was of Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company and was revolutionary. His design was always minimalist and like the rest of absurd theatre focused on stripping theatre back to its simplest state in order to focus on the actors. This set, created by Sally Jacobs, is simply a white box, with many doors and gaps in the walls for entrances. It is also complete with many trapezes that fairies and magical creatures fly in from in an ethereal and absurd entrance. The play was reimagined and asked the audience to imagine the fairies in their own eyes - Brook didn't like literal interpretations.

As well as lots of Shakespearean texts, Brook was responsible for many other performances of scripts like Jean-Paul Satre's 'Vicious Circle (No Exit)', who was a famous existentialist philosopher at the time who aligned with Brook's style. He also directed Richard Strauss's Opera, 'Salome,' which had the set designed by Salvador Dali, a hugely popular surrealist artist who was well known for his bizarre and almost absurd paintings and art works.

During the lesson spent studied Brook, we did multiple simple improvisation exercises that helped us to practice his style that relies on natural theatre, from quickly devising a scene to show some interaction, such as a confrontation, or a celebration, to acting as different emotions and interacting (like a scene from the animated movie Inside Out). This exercise really emphasised the fact that any empty space can become a stage as we continuously moved the action and the audience around the space, and used no dialogue, noise, or props. This forced us to only communicate physically which was challenging at first but necessary to Brook's style. It also focused on the ensemble element of his work as all the emotions in one space were telling a single story.

Brook defined theatre as being in four specific categories, which are detailed in my notes below. They are deadly, holy, rough and immediate theatre. The first describes repetitive, traditional, boring and commercialised theatre - the second, deeper, metaphysical, visceral and existential theatre - the third, political and social, raw, spontaneous and humorous - the final, present, relevant and new. Brook fundamentally aims to avoid deadly theatre and strives to achieve this immediate theatre.