Brook, Peter Stephen Paul

Brook, Peter Stephen Paul (1925– ), English director, already outstanding when in his late teens he directed Marlowe's Dr Faustus and Cocteau's The Infernal Machine on small stages in London. In 1945 his production of King John at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre attracted a good deal of attention, and a year later he was at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre where he directed an enchanting Love's Labour's Lost costumed à la Watteau. In the same year he directed Sartre's Vicious Circle with Alec Guinness as Garcin, and in 1947 two further plays by the same author—Men without Shadows and The Respectable Prostitute—in a double bill. Later that year, at Stratford, he was responsible for a Romeo and Juliet which infuriated the critics, mainly on account of the clumsy cutting and speaking of the verse. He then went to direct opera at Covent Garden, but returned to the theatre with excellent productions of Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon (1950), with Paul Scofield, and Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1953), with Scofield and Gielgud. Later productions included Fry's The Dark is Light Enough (1954) with Edith Evans, Anouilh's The Lark (1955) with Dorothy Tutin, and, at Stratford, Titus Andronicus (also 1955) with Olivier. In the same year the Stratford company, with Brook's production of Hamlet starring Scofield, became the first English company to appear in Moscow since the Revolution. He also directed Dürrenmatt's The Visit (NY, 1958; London, 1960) and The Physicists (London, 1963; NY, 1964). In 1962 Brook was appointed co-director, with Peter Hall and Michel Saint-Denis, of the RSC. His first production at Stratford in his new capacity was King Lear starring Scofield, and at the Aldwych Theatre he directed Weiss's Marat/Sade (1964; NY, 1965) and an experimental documentary, US (1966), on the American intervention in Vietnam. After directing a modern-dress production of Seneca's Oedipus for the National Theatre in 1968, and at Stratford in 1970 (NY, 1971) an internationally acclaimed A Midsummer Night's Dream using stilts, trapezes, and other acrobatic tricks, Brook left England for Paris. Under the influence of Grotowski, and with the encouragement of Jean-Louis Barrault, he opened there his International Centre of Theatre Research, to which the rest of his career has been almost entirely devoted.