Brook in Print

...And, with purblind ahistoricity, he proclaims a "phenomenon peculiar to the 20th century: The truest affirmations are always in opposition to the official line, and the positive statements that the world needs to hear invariably ring hollow...

...Yet in Brook's Foreword, reprinted in The Shifting Point, we read: " The Mahabharata as a whole acquires its concrete meaning from the fact that dharma cannot be defined...

...his movie Lear was shot in northernmost Scandinavia, greatly deverbalized, with the actors swathed in huge, muffling furs...

...To be sure...

...Then there appeared director's theater, in which the director transmutes or transmogrifies what the author has written—if there is an author...

...His film adaptation of Lord of the Flies characteristically dispensed with the script, depending instead on wholesale improvisation—some of which appealed, and much of which palled or appalled...

...If you ask yourself about logical reasons for transitions, that sets up a difficulty...

...Having seen it in one sitting, I can affirm that its good moments are few compared to its dreary hours, neither the human mind nor the human behind having been made for such endurance tests...

...First came the various nonverbal forms based on nonsense words, film and videotape inserts, lasers and holography, far-out sound and movement —in short, multi-media pieces and performance art...

...others may feel about them like the kid in the famous New Yorker cartoon about the alleged broccoli...

...1 wonder how many real working people frequent his International Center of Theater Research (ICTR), as he calls his Paris laboratory or playpen...

...Most of The Mahabharata, for example, hinges on the concept of dharma, which, as Carrière tells us, means truth, justice, duty, and then some...

...the ocean we needed...

...Brook certainly doesn't...

...A completely ruinous Paris theater, it was carefully restored by him to a state of semidilapidation on the assumption, I guess, that a quasiruin is closer to real working people than a plush palace...

...All romantic periods in art were more or less oppositional, though not many reached Brook's degree of commonplace foolishness in defending his wretched movie about Gurdjieff, Encounters with Remarkable Men: "You have to let the film wash over you...

...Often it is a matter of the director improvising with a bunch of actors...

...How faithful the play is to the spirit of the original I am unqualified to say, but its self-contradictions and windy mysticism have the reek of authenticity...

...On the other hand, he is on to something when he argues that what Shakespeare "wrote is not interpretation: It is the thing itself," and that "no one has yet succeeded in nailing Shakespeare down to his own viewpoint: It is the open-ended nature of his writing that is the measure of his genius...

...Brook is similarly impressive on Chekhov, recognizing in his characters "hypervital people in a lethargic world, forced to dramatize the minutest happening out of a passionate desire to live...

...because it has collectively something to affirm," whereas "Western concepts...

...Thus a long essay on the alleged truth of masks as against actors' faces strikes me as modish mystification...

...But while we are waiting for another playwright of such caliber, our theater has been getting boosts from more dubious sources...

...But when he situated Dream in an all-white gymnasium rather than some enchanted wood, with the cast, mostly in white, performing the text amid juggling and acrobaticacts, director's theater was in full English-speaking bloom...

...This kind of vagueness—or, more kindly, untranslatability—adheres to the bulk of the work...

...To my mind, they are a curious combination of the mystical, nebulous and absurd with occasional bits of very good sense, fairly obvious perhaps, yet well worth reiterating in a world dismissive of whatever smacks of logic...

...Brook is on firm ground, too, when he affirms that "the common experience" in the theater "relies on something that is not universal,' i.e., that you reach the general through the specific...

...If the platitude "letting it wash over you" were a legitimate criterion, a hot shower would be the greatest work of art...

...Versions of this preposterous notion keep surfacing: "It is sufficient for an actor to speak these syllables [of ancient Greek] to be lifted out of the emotional constriction of the 20th-century city life into a fullness of passion he never knew he possessed...

...Broken up into separate evenings, the impact, I expect, is considerably weakened...

...But never underestimate the nostalgie de la boue of rich snobs who want to go slumming...

...In reading, without the occasional daring visual effects and exotic music, it is even less rewarding...

...Though Brook's preferred playground is the theater, he enjoys such other arenas as the movies and opera as well...

...Readers who equate concreteness with the indefinable should relish both books...

...No work of art has yet made a better man," he soberly declares, a statement uncontradicted by his belief "that theater can help us to see better...

...I appreciate his efforts to reconcile in theater the contemporary event with the mythic, yet wish he had a less marked prejudice for the non-Occidental—making him, for instance, gush over simplistic experiences with African village audiences...

...Socrates, of course, wasjustasmuch in opposition to the official line, as were countless religious, political and cultural dissidents through the ages...

...They immersed themselves in many talks with experts, collateral readings, collations of French and English translations, trips to India, and years of work by Carrière on a French acting version that, in Brook's English rendering, as The Mahabharata, takes up 235 pages or nine hours' performing, either at one swoop or subdivided into three evenings...

...In the past, it was the playwright of genius who came up with the new form...

...I think he is right, though, when he expatiates on there being "no reason for men and women to have grotesque bodies simply because they sing, " and on the hypertrophy of the pit orchestra making superhuman demands on singers...

...Brook prided himself on not changing the text, yet words with references to a forest spoken in what looks like a hospital or asylum ward take on a very different meaning...

...Here, with a company from the First, Second and Third Worlds, French and English are mangled in adaptations from such things as Persian nondramatic literature and ethnographic studies of African tribes, in productions rehearsed for months, if not years...

...But, as I said, there is also a sensible side to Brook...

...As for opera, he gradually worked himself up, or down, to a Carmen, rewritten, reorchestrated, reduced, and decked out with the visual tricks he has been developing at his home base, the Bouffes du Nord...

...The height of director's theater— literally as well as figuratively—was Orghast, a play in a language the poet Ted Hughes concocted from other languages, including ancient Greek and ancient Persian ? vesta...

...These and other highlights of Brook's career figure in The Shifting Point, his new collection of essays, consisting chiefly of program notes, interviews, media pieces introducing, annotating and publicizing his productions, along with a few tributes to theatrical figures the director finds congenial, like Jerzy Grotowski and Gordon Craig...

...In any case, there are too many characters, too many plot developments and shadowy prehistory, too many things that remain unactable or inscrutable...

...Brook, or part of him, is fatally drawn to the irrational, as when he asserts that "in listening to Avesta, it never happens that one wants to know "what it means'" because "there is never any distance at all between sound and content...

...Many of the pieces are quite short, some mere aphorisms...

...Years later, taking his troupe on a tour of Africa and performing around campfires and in village market places, Brook may have atoned for that...

...Up until his celebrated—or notorious—production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Brook remained within the pale, although hints of the future could be found in his Marat/Sade and even earlier...

...In pursuing the "supernaturalistic theater ahead of us" that, as he says elsewhere, "touches people as music does," Brook is repeatedly drawn to the East...

...Reviewed by John Simon Like every other art, theater needs periodic rejuvenation...

...sees [his] part as being smaller than himself will always give a bad performance...

...So we have had the heightened naturalism of the late Eugene O'Neill, the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht, the poetic realism of Tennessee Williams, the toned-down surrealism of Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the so-called absurdism of Samuel Beckett, etc...

...are founded on an inessential, degenerate Christianity, in which good and evil have assumed very primitive forms...

...Brook calls the piece "a work of limitless facets and levels...

...And by the time of his King Lear out of Brecht and Beckett, via the Polish critic Jan Kott, the text, too, was fiddled with to accommodate the director's notions and assert his hegemony...

...The first famed practitioner of director's theater in English was Peter Brook...

...His ICTR spent a lot of time with its house playwright, Jean-Claude Carrière, on adapting the epic of the Sufi poet Attar, The Conference of the Birds, with many effects but, in my view, to little effect...

...It is amazing how willingly a friend of the common people allowed himself to be subsidized by the supreme satrap and his culture-mongering consort...

...His movie version of Marat/Sade was largely out-of-focus blobs...

...It was produced on t he carved hillsides near Persepolis with money from the Shall of Iran and his Empress, for their guests and assorted nabobs...

...Soundly he states that "any actor who...

...It is now inasort of neutral, essentially contemporary language of no great charm...

...That play was, however, a mere Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean that next engaged him and Carrière: the stage adaptation of the Mahabharata, the Hindu religious epic 15 times as long as the Bible...

...So, too, Brook is only too eager to pronounce ancient Egypt "a state [that] genuinely celebrates...