Never meet your heroes, the saying goes. When I first encountered Peter Brook, in 2010, he was not a lot hero as legend: guru, shaman, magus, maestro. He was frail – tiny, too, shuffling into the theatre in huge, thick-soled white footwear. However the second he educated his well-known ice-water-blue gaze on you, it was clear his thoughts was made from metal.
Status does humorous issues to individuals; particularly in theatre, an artform given to myth-making, the place tales about well-known reveals you didn’t occur to see develop with the telling. I’m a long time too younger, as an illustration, to have witnessed seen any of Brook’s early or middle-period work, the sprawling spectacles of La Conférence des Oiseaux or The Mahabharata. The director I encountered was the late minimalist, the polisher of parable-like items that gleamed like pebbles beneath the floor of a river. Usually they had been cryptic, generally downright puzzling. However Brook’s means to conjure a gleaming theatrical picture – collaborating because the mid-Nineteen Seventies along with his trusted lieutenant, Marie-Hélène Estienne – was unparalleled. I recall the actor William Nadylam in The Go well with whisking a handkerchief from a pocket and turning it right into a tablecloth, voilà, similar to that. Then there was a night of Beckett shorts with Marcello Magni, Khalifa Natour and Kathryn Hunter. I’m ready not simply to image it in my thoughts however to virtually replay it, so piercing was its readability.
Brook was additionally – and that is rarer than one would suppose – an intensely musical director. His cut-to-the-quick Magic Flute with piano and a solid of 9, which I noticed in 2011, caught the gossamer lightness of Mozart’s writing and exuded impish joie de vivre. Brook displayed a equally stressed creativity that was absolutely Mozartian, in addition to the ability of switching from ebullience to grave seriousness in a flash. Brook additionally had the peculiar showman’s artwork that made all of it appear artless. Once I interviewed Estienne in 2015, she instructed me his actors – normally of their 30s and 40s – discovered the calls for of countless rehearsal exhausting, however Brook himself by no means did.
Battlefield (2015), based mostly on The Mahabharata, flickered in focus for me: at instances thrillingly clear, at instances gnomic to the purpose of obscurity. The Prisoner, which got here to London in 2018, was purportedly based mostly on an encounter from Brook’s personal life 4 a long time earlier than, it felt each out of time and out of joint, significantly in its portrayal of themes akin to incestuous rape and colonialism. However for anybody to take care of a 70-year-plus profession within the theatre, not to mention one which modified instructions as typically as Brook’s did, is astonishing. Brook appeared to have held on to his youth partly through his involvement with youthful theatre-makers. In addition to being a beneficiant collaborator, he welcomed a gradual stream of acolytes to tthe Bouffes du Nord and in his later years turned a visiting elder statesman at London’s Younger Vic. Canine-eared copies of his e book The Empty House could now not be essential accent for wannabe administrators (and thank goodness for that, Brook may need stated), however his affect is throughout: within the hectic inventiveness of Complicité, the stripped-back essentialism of Cheek by Jowl, in addition to within the types of theatre-makers as different as Marianne Elliott, Robert Icke, Emma Rice and Ivo van Hove.
Watch corporations akin to 1927 or Frantic Meeting, or the boundary and border-crossing experimentalism of administrators akin to Yaël Farber, Kwame Kwei-Armah and Tim Supple, and you're seeing Brook’s affect, typically from work finished greater than a technology in the past. His most essential legacy is perhaps making mainstream drama correctly multicultural. His initiatives with artists from throughout the globe, of many cultural backgrounds and ethnicities, have their critics, however they had been genuinely pioneering. They helped change the face – and faces – of theatre for good, and infuse inward-facing British theatre with a way of continental elan.
Considered one of my final encounters with Brook got here in 2015, on the Bouffes’. The solid had taken their bows, the viewers begun to scatter. I used to be up within the gods once I noticed Brook far under. He’d been hanging again within the shadows; I used to be instructed later that he wasn’t meant to be in that night time. However he couldn’t resist popping by to see how the present was getting on. I watched him being guided gently by means of the proscenium arch to offer the actors notes. A couple of delicate phrases of recommendation and he’d be gone.
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