Peter Brook, the theater “globetrotter” who hated flatterers

The director of “Lord of the Flies”. “Moderato”, “King Lear”, “Encounters with extraordinary men”, he goes away in harmony with himself, indifferent to the noise .. He leaves us the nourishment of that “necessary theater” which, like everyone’s life, changes rhythm and breath, giving “a hard time” until the end

by Angelo Pizzuto

When will be the moment (when?) To take stock of what “was, was not, could have been the Theater of the Twentieth Century”, that of ‘weak thought’ and ‘short breath’, that is, the widespread availability of its creators not to absolutize their work, their directives (thus wary of dogmatists, academics and onanists brain suckers) …. when we decide that “it will be” or that it probably “has already been there”, the name of Peter Brook, theater (and cinema) director will occupy the place that – if we were in an ecclesial environment – would be at the top of Carthusian art and “non-spectacular” as the starting point of his ideas, opinions, operational choices. Implied: there will be the names of Peter Stein, Luca Ronconi, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Carmelo Bene, Antonin Artaud, the Living (and of all those who, involuntarily, I am omitting). However, leaving Brook with the merit – and the singularity – of never having claimed to “teach”, of “being a theorist” of what fortunately cannot be theorized once and for all, crystallized in a “single faith” that would be harmful for all of us.

Hence the need for a theater as a need for “research”, “meditation”, collective consciousness (open to all doubts and contributions), opposed to any aesthetics of exhibitionism, of spectacularity as an end in itself, therefore proselytizing of “concentration” that only a certain stage space (collected, circular, as a symposium and cavea for an accomplice, collected, not elite public) can fertilize. Infused by the firmness of the word, by the frugality of the gesture, by that particular feeling of Epicity that only Brook knew how to instill in every experience, even the most frugal or short-lived, like the startled monologue by Dostoewskij “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” (or Christ Jesus, the Nazarene of the laity)

As a vocational globetrotter “passing from London to Paris, Brook marked the way for hundreds of actors and opened the eyes of thousands of spectators, who could appreciate a different theater, mobile, open, simple but not improvised, linear and essential but never poor ”(Notes an independent author, Giulia Mozzato, on a facebook page). Impeccable.

Also passing through the search for a primitive but not definitive theatrical language, made up of sounds and elementary pantomimics.

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Already at the age of twenty, Brook already directed his first Shakespeare, making his debut in a Stratford-on-Avon theater (“Romeo and Juliet”, produced by the Royal Company), and unleashing violent reaction from critics codina for having set the tragedy “in an arena orange illuminated by naked white lights ”- and Franciscan sobriety of costumes. His debut directories had already been Marlowe’s “Faust” and “The infernal machine” stubbornly desired (conceived) in an England still shaken by Nazi bombings (“I too have lived my hardest hours”). But letting the Bard be his mentor for at least twenty years. Thus enumerating historical, magmatic editions of “Love’s pains lost” (1946), “Measure by measure” (1950), “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1970), “Timone d’Atene”, “Antonio and Cleopatra ”, also passing through a magnificent“ Titus Andronicus ”played by Laurence Olivier and“ King Lear ”starring Paul Scofield. Then by memorizing their experiences in a sort of diary ‘in public’ (“The theater and its space” published in 1969, collecting ‘materials’ written in thirty years), which – among other things – bring to mind one of his ” Salomè ”by Wilde (with sets by Dalì) played on the sly in 1949.

Oscillating between “the rough and the sacred” (in the sense of a non-confessional spirituality), from the 1960s onwards Peter Brook developed a personal, non-epigone relationship with the “theater of cruelty” (theorized by Artaud), leaving its indelible imprint in at least two cases: “Marat-Sade” by Weiss and “US”, a forerunner docu.drama of the genre dedicated to the war in Vietnam not only as an indictment (of capital-geopolitical interests), but true and precisely the watershed of history following the second conflict, whose prophetic value rises today – and explodes – with the tragedies of Ukraine.

Giving strength to his dissent and his polyglot skills, the director set up his group in Paris, at the head of a ‘chariot’ of actors from several nations, and the definitive replacement of the native but not ancestral (Peter’s parents were Russian Jews ) with an accented, neutral French, “imagined, according to the Hellenic tradition, as the new koiné of artistic Europe”.

Brook’s experimentation however develops outside Great Britain. Only border: the planet earth. Starting with “Orghast” (1971) conceived and made in Iran with twenty-five actors of ten nationalities, followed by “Ubu” by Jarry “The congress of birds (between Aristophanes and an ancient Sufi poem),” The bone “revisiting of an ancient African fairy tale.

Since 1970, Brook has directed the Center for Theatrical Creativity in Paris, electing the Buffets du Nord as his home and refuge. In this context we will include “Carmen” from 1981) and the cosmogony of the “Mahabharata” (available in a film version, with our personal recommendation of the late Vittorio Mezzogiorno), which the director considered “the Bible of culture, of oriental civilization (in broad sense), “fixed” in a collective retreat of nine hours of performance (Ronconi and Stein considered him their “pioneer”).

Visceral choices and enormous open-mindedness that teased some American critics (eg. Kenneth Tynan) to slurs such as “why this man of immense talent does not stop grappling with the highest philosophical systems and doing theater like any other English director of its level? ” (leveling). Echoing him Eric Bentley “does Peter Brook realize or not that he is being exploited politically, with the excuse of his mystical vocation?” (intolerant, ideologically Manichean).

Indifferent to the noise, the director continued on his way intensifying his cinematic excursions “Lord of the Flies” by Golding, “Moderated by Duras,” King Lear “stripped of ‘authorial’ conventions,” Encounters with extraordinary men “by GI Gurdjieff ).

Brook goes away in harmony with himself (hazard?) And the nourishment of that “necessary theater” which, like everyone’s life, changes rhythm and breath, giving “a hard time” to the end. Even Orazio Costa often repeated it among his greatest Italian exegetes.

Peter Brook, the theater “globetrotter” who hated flatterers