International Centre of Theatre Research

International Centre of Theatre Research, organization founded as a result of Barrault's invitation to Peter Brook to conduct in Paris in 1968 a workshop for actors, writers, and directors from diverse backgrounds and cultures. This experience inspired Brook to open two years later, in a former tapestry factory, a theatrical centre for questioning, experimentation, and discovery, his colleagues being chosen from over 150 theatre workers from all over the world. One of the Centre's first projects was a retelling of the myth of Prometheus in a new language called Orghast invented by the poet Ted Hughes. It was staged on a mountain top in front of the tomb of King Artaxerxes, overlooking the ruins of Persepolis. In 1972 Brook took his company to Africa, where they toured through five countries, playing on a carpet in temples, houses, squares, forests, and on dirt roads. Much of their work was improvisational, as in The Conference of the Birds, based on a work by the 12th-century Persian poet Farid Uddin Attar, revived in the USA in 1973. In 1974 the Centre moved to the derelict Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, deliberately left in its dilapidated state. The first production there, a French version of Timon of Athens, was followed in 1975 by The Ik, the true story of an African tribe (London, 1976). Later productions were Alfred Jarry's Ubu-Roi (1977); Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1981; NY, 1988); La Tragédie de Carmen (1981; NY, 1983; Glasgow, 1989), a pared-down version of Bizet's opera; and Mahabharata (Avignon and Paris, 1985; NY, 1987; Glasgow, 1988), a nine-hour adaptation of a pre-Christian Indian epic.