Peter Brook

Peter Brook 1925-, English theatrical director, b. London. An innovative, unconventional, and controversial figure, Brook mounts energetic productions in which the entire stage is utilized and realistic sets are banished in favor of bold, abstract, and austere settings. His approach is extremely physical, and he often has his actors sing, play musical instruments, and perform acrobatics. His production of Love's Labour's Lost (1946) began his long association with what became in 1961 the Royal Shakespeare Company . Subsequent Shakespearean productions included Measure for Measure (1950), Titus Andronicus (1955), King Lear (1962), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1970), which was set in a kind of adult playground with trapezes, stilts, and spinning plates. Other Brook productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company included his famous staging of Peter Weiss 's Marat/Sade (1964), a play within a play set in the insane asylum housing the Marquis de Sade that examines both revolution and madness, and US (1966), an attack on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. During the 1960s, Brook's productions were influenced both by the shock tactics of Antonin Artaud and the analytical detachment of Bertolt Brecht .

Brook has also directed films, such as Moderato Cantabile (1960), Lord of the Flies (1963), and King Lear (1971); and operas, such as Faust and Eugene Onegin. In the 1970s, he founded the International Center of Theatre Research in Paris, an assembly of actors, dancers, musicians, and other performers of many nationalities. Their most recognized achievement was a nine-hour presentation of the Indian epic The Mahabharata (1985). Since then Brook has created a variety of other theatrical works, such as a version of Oliver Sacks 's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1994), a production of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1998), a streamlined Hamlet (2000), and Tierno Bokar (2005), a theater piece based on the life of a West African Sufi in the 1930s. His books on the theater include Empty Space (1969), The Shifting Point (1987), and The Open Door (1995).

Bibliography: See his autobiographical Threads of Time (1998); Gregory Boyd, ed., Between Two Silences: Talking with Peter Brook (1999); biographies by J. C. Trewin (1971), A. Hunt and G. Reeves (1995), and M. Kustow (2005).

Brook, Peter (1925– ), theatre director, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. The most innovative director of post-war Britain and Europe, he has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, directing classics (memorably, King Lear, 1962, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1970) and modern plays, but is most celebrated internationally for his experimental work. Landmark productions include Weiss's Marat/Sade (1964), The Ik (1975, a multicultural drama of African famine based on an anthropological premiss), the Mahabharata (1985; UK 1988), and L'Homme Qui (1993), based on a work by Oliver Sacks. Working with an international Paris-based company, travelling widely, and transcending conventional notions of text and theatrical space, he has been a powerful influence on 20th-cent. theatre. His travels to Iran in 1971 with Ted Hughes resulted in Hughes's play in an invented language, Orghast. Threads of Time (1998) is a memoir. See also Cruelty, Theatre of.