Peter Brook's Immediacy

...they issued calls to arms that cagjly named the weapons but not the ammunition...

...In his Lear, acting, lighting, sound, and environment came together in several tableaux that were ineffable and for me have remained ineffaceable—as in the transcendent moment when Gloucester squatted, eyeless, dumb, and with hands over his ears, inside the vast gray-green box that was the set while the din of a battle reverberated around him...

...So many plays are lamed by honesty, which can amount to a cop-out, a failure to explore a play down to its marrow on the pretext that thoroughness involves "tampering...

...If anyone were to try to use [this book] as a handbook, then I can definitely warn him—there are no formulas: there are no methods...

...True...

...An associate prop man for an amateur stab at Barefoot in the Park in the local Rotarians' bridge salon knows that the show goes up and down with the audiences' response, and that the warmer audiences get a more enjoyable evening for their tax deductions...

...Brook's first chapter takes whacks at the "Deadly Theater," the components of which seem to be superficiality, hidebound tradition, insulation from the facts of life, and cowardice...

...In that contradiction, in the choice of when the enforcement begins and how it uses what has gone before, lies Brook's art...

...The holy theater lassoes Artaud, Meyerhold, Grotowski, Beckett, and the Becks, as well as the dance of Merce Cunningham...

...A truism, in fact...

...They are an actual hindrance when they volunteer to walk clumsily across the boards or to sing the first verse that percolates into their mouths...

...At the close of his book, Brook comes around to the matter that lurks behind all four chapters: the role of the spectator...

...How is it received on this side...

...The later he makes his decisions, the better...

...Which is an old-fashioned but unbeatable procedure for coping with the new...

...Brook, on the other hand, has created his theater—some of it at any rate, for we must hope there is a lot more to come...

...In other words, he reverses the multiplier: the better the performance, the better the audience, with all the accruals of a two-way feedback...

...it has to be enforced...

...Perhaps there is something spurious in Brook's determination to keep an audience sold from one end of an evening to the other, to race its motor, lift it off its collective rump from time to time, and sometimes deny it the chance to test its own emotional grappling hooks...

...Brook likes the verb "evolve" and the adjective "organic...

...Even scenic elements and costumes are not finished until the show opens: "The best designer evolves step by step with the director [the designer and director, not the design and direction], going back, changing...

...he closes rehearsals by imposing himself...

...Rough theater is popular and earthy...

...What we actually mean is "lethal," but let that pass...

...Best of all, in the past five years under the benevolent wings of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater in London, he has put together three productions (King Lear, Marat/Sade and Seneca's Oedipus) that bumped the theater out of its old decorum while winning over a general public...

...art speaks of its time to its time, even when it screeches or mutters...

...As I continue to work, each experience will make these conclusions inconclusive again...

...So directors looking to the theater of the future, especially if it grows out of today's half-holy theater of togetherness, may have to train their audiences...

...At present people blush and drop their dentures when called on to take a sudden, active part in theatrical proceedings...

...Confidence has a way of lapsing into complacency...

...The rough theater has Brecht, Jarry and William Poel (whose "stripped-down Shakespeare" employed only actors and their costumes to conjure up the scenes...

...Whether he writes about the Peking Opera, theatrical ceremony, Romeo and Juliet, Chekhov, Jerzy Grotowski's troupe in Wroclaw, the uses of design, or his improvisations with actors, Brook is so sane (and thus at times revolutionary) that one wishes these reflections had been extended, instead of being ladled into four chapters and a tenuous theme about occupying the empty space that is a bare stage...

...Brook has avoided these difficulties...

...There is a time for discussing the broad lines of a play, there is a time for forgetting them, for discovering what can only be found through joy, extravagance, irresponsibility...

...But the stayers—we see this more clearly every season—are of almost no help to the cast and director when they let themselves be handled, disparaged, and praised...

...Such efforts seem to denote the director's lack of confidence in others (or in himself), a resolve to spoon-feed, a willingness to resort to flashy business when honesty doesn't appear to do the job...

...He goes all over the world to work, observe, and learn...

...Some stop going to the theater...

...I would undertake to teach anyone all that I know about theater rules and technique in a few hours...

...But collaboration doesn't just happen...

...The colossal bandwagon of culture trundles on," he adds, "carrying each artist's traces to the ever-mounting garbage heap...

...The intervening chapters are grab bags about "holy" and "rough" theater...

...Otherwise, they will be wasting their actors' time and ramshackle skills...

...Theater people are always talking glibly about "the need for collaboration...

...They were both terrified of having their ideas stolen or, worse, filched in part and distorted...

...If Brook has a trade secret he does not define it in so many words...

...Reading The Empty Space one misses the fanaticism, the incandescence, of the great directing theoreticians—of Gordon Craig in Scene, or of Artaud in The Theatre and Its Double...

...His chapter on the immediate theater makes it clear that he has nothing to lose except to another Peter Brook, an unlikely recurrence...

...He has not dreamed up a theater of cruelty or a Craig-like play of hinged screens, shifting colored light, encroaching shadows, and eight-foot iibermarionetten in motion, but it is a fair bet that he could bring off either one on an empty space better than its originator...

...somewhere in the compound is the mystery ingredient, Peter Brook...

...In Brook's case the director sometimes is the designer, and a splendid one...

...The characteristics that push Brook head and shoulders, brain and heart, above other English-speaking directors are—given his startling conceptions—his tact and eclecticism...

...He echoes here what we have heard for the past 40 years, that the soul of art is perishable, not for the ages...

...But in slipshod productions Shakespeare is always deadly...

...When we say deadly," he explains, "we never mean dead: we mean something depressingly active, but for this very reason capable of change...

...As if by design they were short on cool, practical detail, long on hot, rhapsodic claims...

...But "suddenly one morning the work must change: the result must become all important...

...so do hard labor, sympathy, and a belief in miracles...

...Craig and Artaud suffered alike from persecution-mania...

...A similar judiciousness and eclectic taste mark his book, The Empty Space, a sloppily proofread but absorbing document, drawn from about 25 years of theatrical practice...

...The rest is practice—and that cannot be done alone...

...It promotes uplift, takes us out of and away from ourselves into union and communion—and, with any luck, a brief transfiguration...

...Since his teenage days he has swung from theater to opera and back, with excursions into cinema (Moderato Cantabile, Lord of the Flies, and filmings of U.S...

...A mobile imagination has something to do with it...

...These remarks sound like Brook taking refuge behind the old pro's mask, but his staging affirms that he does not hesitate to step out of ruts...

...it depends on what lines of what play you are talking about...

...Obviously, that the theater resembles the Keynesian multiplier effect: the better the audience, the better the performance...

...and Marat/Sade...

...The audience," he says, "assists the actor, and at the same time for the audience itself assistance comes back from the stage...

...Yet who in this difficult art can dare to become confident...

...We would expect his last chapter, then, to be about the "Immediate Theater," and it is...

...He has tried his hand at frilly stuff (Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon), hard-bottomed sexware (The Little Hut, Irma La Douce), intellectual bilge (The Physicists), and the odd lump of junk (House of Flowers), while keeping the other hand free for Beckett, Brecht and Shakespeare...

...Although he has taken to the new theater as eagerly as anybody, he keeps his eyes on the performance...

...As an argument of sorts The Empty Space is scrappy, although the scraps are individually excellent...

...A director has the right to tell himself over and over that the theater could be consumed any time by a gigantic yawn...

...Shakespeare, by the way, can be holy as well as rough...

...The "immediate" species consists of the nitrations of these other two, added but not mixed...

...Others stay with it because "this is what the kids go for...

...His "field of work," as he puts it, "is inseparable from all the things on my passport —nationality, date of birth, place of birth, physical characteristics, color of eyes, signature...

...For him, as for Pirandello, theater is not formal art but something that lives and easily dies—or turns deadly...

...What does one gather from this state of affairs...

...it tells us about our limitations as men...

...He opens rehearsals by refusing to delimit the play or the feasible interpretations of it...

...Also, it is inseparable from today's date...

...But it lies on the far side of what used to be the footlights...

...He is the visionary's complete right-hand man...