Brook was the first to think of including all ethnic groups

The death of the English theater director Peter Brook caused consternation among the artistic community of Mexico, a country in which he appeared on several occasions together with his company, and whose theoretical texts were widely known.

The general director of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, Lucina Jiménez, told the day: “Peter Brook reinvented the theater and opened up the possibility of existing here and there, in any space where that ritual of conviviality that the scene represents, the meeting of energy between an actor, an actress and their audience is possible. He hurts leaving him. We are staying in the orphanage”.

For stage director Rodolfo Obregón, Brook’s great contribution is the breadth of his thought, “the idea of ​​recovering spirituality in the theater, but also of its more practical, more immediate sense, what he called the theater rough. Even its material and economic aspects”. He also showed the “willingness to work with actors from all over the world.” He cultivated “a failed idea of ​​finding something essential in man beyond culture to finally realize that it is not possible to get rid of culture and embody a representation of the world with all the richness, the cultural colors that make it up.”

Luis de Tavira, stage director, commented: “One of the greatest creators and proponents of modern theater in the second half of the 20th century dies. Brook is a sum in which the deep intuitions that achieved the survival of the theater in the decisive crisis that it had to face in the immediate post-war period are integrated. An art sentenced to death, which seemed to lose all its validity and its place in society.

“A paradoxical moment of amazing splendor for the makers of the theater who proposed the emergency that would make the theater achieve not only its survival, but also the recovery of its powerful status as an autonomous art.

“Brook is a true heir to a very powerful Shakespearean tradition in England. He assumes the tradition but drives the avant-garde. For me the relevance of Brook consists in being an enormous creator who supposed a synthesis, a sum, of the tradition, of the validity of a current theater that has a decisive importance in the construction of the conscience of today. Brook is a traveler who goes out into the world, is interested in the theater of other cultures and attempts a synthesis”.

Brook’s death produces “a feeling of being an orphan,” said the stage director, Germán Castillo, because “he was a personality whose work and thought enriched us theater artists for almost 70 years, at least in my case.” He remembered his staging at the Galeón Theater, of a ubu kingUnforgettable, I think, for all of us who saw it.”

He brought up the “generous and warm message” that Brook sent the last time his company came to Mexico, shortly after the 2017 earthquake, in which he “sent us encouragement and apologies for not being able to be in Mexico due to the altitude. That fineness of treatment and spiritual refinement is not common, even less in the older people of the art. We will be in mourning for a long time.”

Regarding his legacy, the playwright Jaime Chabaud pointed out: “He is not a figure that is controversial, that causes the most diverse and conflicting reactions, on the contrary, he was a unifier, someone who reconciled the greatest enthusiasm in laymen and professionals.”

According to stage director José Luis Cruz, Brook’s death is a profound loss in Western, Eastern and African theater, because he was “one of the great innovators, heir to the great Russian innovators. He was of an absolutely universal mind, as well as a permanent investigator. I remember your Mahabharata that I physically saw, as I was invited to a couple of rehearsals at the time I lived in Paris. Jerzy Grotowski arrived to help him conceive some scenes. All the games that he invented on stage constituted a return to the ritual of the theater, especially with this founding Hindu text.

“He worked a lot with some African playwrights whose texts he staged with simplicity in an abandoned theater in Paris that he never wanted to fix. Brook is the first to think of the inclusion of all ethnic groups in the world. He is an amazing creator. For me, he loses a great thinker and artist because he was not only a playwright, but many other things”.

Brook was the first to think of including all ethnic groups