Directors Like Peter Brook example essay topic

For theatre to survive, the world needs more directors like Peter Brook. Peter Brook is one of contemporary theatres greatest inventors. He is unique in comparison to other modern directors as he searches for 'the thing itself before it has been made anything. ' From the late 1950's through the 1960's, Brook repeatedly described himself as 'searching' and 'experimenting. ' This experimental phase of his career, with its questions about audience and abstraction, eventually led Brook to abandon commercial theatre for the International Centre of Theatre Research (CIRT). CIRT is a workshop he founded in Paris in 1970, it continues today and is non-commercial.

It is evident from reviews and remarks of respected theatre goers across the globe that Brook's style is refreshing, interesting and a little strange. Sir Barry Jackson called Brook 'the youngest earthquake I've known,' and many others have described him as a surprisingly forceful person with a style to match. At the beginning of his production of The Brothers Karamazov in 1946, the theatre grew dark until even the exit lights went out, and suddenly a gunshot rang out. He shocked audiences three years later in his production of Dark of the Moon when he staged a witch hanging upside down from the proscenium arch.

There was also a scene that Kenneth Tynan remembered as 'one of the most exciting events I had ever witnessed on the stage. ' Brook was unique in his time and became well known for surprise endings in his plays. What is the point of producing theatre if it is all the same? This director did plays with flamboyant dramaturgy, graceful words, and faraway, incredible locations.

During the 1940's, he found British theatre as colourless as wartime and post-war Britain, and he saw there a 'great gap between good material and indifferent achievement. ' As a result, he was selected to direct by 'shaping, turning, shifting actors and materials in a certain direction, a new direction. ' When I first started work,' he has recalled, 'what seemed to me most important was that the result should be alive. ' His reputation for 'ingenious' directing grew until, as one actress said, 'No one could mention Peter without prefixing the word 'clever' to his name, and in an odd way, it trivialized all his work. ' To call a director great, unique and one of a kind: you must look exactly at what they have done. For Peter Brook there is no need to look far, as classical drama has been greatly affected by the director.

'To communicate any one of Shakespeare's plays to a present day audience,' he wrote in 1948, a director 'must be prepared to set every resource of modern theatre at the disposal of his text. ' No phoney 'tradition' here - that was only 'orthodox post-Victorian's style, said Brook. At the Shakespeare Qua tercentenary of 1964, he urged the RSC 'through bold experiment and the risk of failure, to create a new tradition, to put into question the entire process of interpretation, to revivify Shakespeare's meaning, moment for moment, with today's means for today's spectators. ' When speaking of reviving Shakespeare, Brooks my sound to some as being arrogant: 'I do not for one moment question the principle of rewriting Shakespeare - after all, the texts do not get burned. ' However Brook's view, which is both revolutionary and controversial, has always been that conveying 'Shakespeare's meaning' is the goal of a production. When Brook has found the inner dream of a play, he has created productions that seem to burst into meaning.

After Tom Johnson of New York's Village Voice had seen Brook's Carmen - four singers, an orchestra of fifteen, one eighty-minute act of heavily rewritten plot - in Paris in 1982, he began his review with words that echo those of dozens of earlier critics: 'It was as if I had never seen Carmen before. It was almost as if I had never seen an opera before. ' A sign of change is a sign of a great artist. It is important for directors, musicians, actors and anyone working in the arts industry to explore their depths to reach their full potential.

'I don't know. ' These words might have served as Brook's motto during the late 1950's and early 1960's when his career began to change. He showed other signs of change in his mid-thirties: more interest in film, and a preference for plays by Jean Genet, Friedrich Durrenmatt, and Rolf Hoch huth, so that his theatre took on a more political flavour. In order for people to change and progress, they must question themselves.

Through questioning ideas, answers will be found that weren't thought to exist. Brooks questioning of theatre were dominant during this time of change. Why and how were words part of theatre? What was the correct relation of actor to audience? Was the theatre progressive enough for its time? Were its troubles ascribable to the economic conservatism of its managements?

To the shapes of its theatre houses? To a failure of spirit? Finally, was there any legitimate need for theatre in modern Western Culture? On into the 1970's he pursued this question: 'How to make theatre absolutely and fundamentally necessary to people, as necessary as eating and sex?' He had concluded that 'make believe is necessity.

' Brook's first line of questioning concerned realism. Brook's set designs show his reaction against realism. But his reaction was also scholarly. He felt that modern ideas of time, self, or reality were not embodied by Ibsen ite dramaturgy: 'We know that the theatre lags behind the other arts because its continual need for immediate success chains it to the slowest members of its audience. But is there nothing in the revolution that took place in painting fifty years ago that applies to our own crisis today? Do we know where we stand in relation to the real and the unreal, the face of life and its hidden streams, the abstract and the concrete, the story and the ritual?' Brook was also admirable for being honest about what he searched for, and the way he spoke about the world's social situation.

Brook knew that his search was in the direction of hidden streams, abstraction, and ritual. Theatre could be 'real, dramatic and meaningful' and still abandon the 'traditional crutches' of clock time, consistent characterization, and suspenseful plotting. He wanted to show 'the true driving forces of our time' rather than superficial 'social problems. ' 'And are we sure that in relation to twentieth-century living, the great abstractions - speed, strain, space, frenzy, energy brutality - aren't more concrete, more immediately likely to affect our lives than the so-called concrete issues?' Without an audience, there is no theatre. It is easy for those involved in producing performances to forget about why they are together making this play happen. The reason why, is fundamentally for the audience.

Without reaching to the spectators and the public, there is no use in staging a performance. Brook's second line of questioning concerned audiences. His directing before 1960 had emphasised beautiful pictures, but pictures completely isolated from the audience. In his search for a new theatre, he investigated the relationship between actors and audiences. He placed an actor on a stage facing an audience and asked, Is he interesting?

Has he captured our attention? Why or why not? Jerzy Grotowski noticed this emphasis in Brook's work soon after they became acquainted and made the following comparison: 'My search is based on the director and the actor. You base yours on the director, actor and audience.

' Brook agreed, saying that 'the only thing that all forms of theatre have in common is the need for an audience. ' In 1973, after having taken his CIRT troupe to Africa, he said: 'What is of total importance is that the theatre phenomenon only exists when the chemical meeting of what has been prepared by a group of people, and is incomplete, comes into relationship with another group, a wider circle which is the people who are there as spectators. When a fusion takes place, then there is a theatre event. When the fusion doesn't take place there is no event.

' Brook is not describing good theatre or successful theatre or ideal theatre but the 'theatre event,' which 'only exists when' actors and audience move each other to affective and intellectual interaction. Although this statement may be obvious, if the director does not work to please the audience, than show will not do well. The relation between actor and audience ultimately becomes the relation between theatre and community. Brook stated this belief when he found CIRT: 'The special virtue of the theatre as an art form is that it is inseparable from the community. ' This partially explains his lifelong fascination with Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theatrical model.

Following the same ideas of audience and performer connection, Brook believed that theatre could still serve as a meeting where 'this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life. The marvel of being one. ' Disturbance, Brook believed, was theatre's 'one precise social function'; anything less was an indication of artistic and intellectual bad faith. His message to a London interviewer at the time of Marat / Sade was that: 'violence is the natural artistic language of the times. A play must leave you in a more receptive mood than you were before.

If isn't there to 'move' people. That's a ghastly idea. You cry, you have a bath of sentiment. You come out saying you " ve had a lovely time. I prefer the notion of disturbance which leaves you in a greater state of disturbance. ' Although every individual has their own ideas on what the function of theatre is, Brook seems to be one that will actually make theatre last.

If companies continually churn out big-budget musicals year after year, the public will be sick of them. The reason why big-budget musicals do well is because they " re an easy ride. Real theatre is what Brook is talking about. That is the connection between the audience and the performer, not the expensive tinsel waved around to the latest brass band number.