Guardian, UK

Arts and entertainment

A Prospero for our time

Michael Kustow’s biography charts Peter Brook’s transformation from
precocious master to itinerant sage. Simon Callow pays homage

Saturday April 2, 2005
The Guardian

Buy Peter Brook at the Guardian bookshop

Peter Brook: A Biography
by Michael Kustow
352pp, Bloomsbury, £25

In the spring of 1970, from my peep-hole in the box office of the Aldwych, I
glimpsed the thoughtful faces of the associate directors of the RSC as they
returned to London from Stratford for one of their regular meetings. They
had just seen the first night of Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream . As they filed past on their way to the office upstairs, they
were uncharacteristically quiet. They knew that Brook had done it again:
moved the goal-posts for Shakespearean production, in the process redefining
himself as a director, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and to some extent the
theatre itself. In his work with the actors he had set out to discover what
he called “the secret play”, ignoring any realistic pointers in the text,
banishing every traditional context in which the play had ever been
performed, rejoicing in circus skills and crude music-hall gags while, at
the same time, sounding the soaring lyricism of the verse at full throttle.
Mendelssohn’s wedding march blasted out of the loudspeakers and the nature
of Titania’s attraction to her donkey lover was made absolutely clear. In
its white box of a set, all the play’s lewd energy, its beauty, its darkness
and its light, and, unforgettably, its power to heal, were released.

It was the last piece of theatre Brook created as a resident of this
country. For the subsequent 35 years of his life, he has roamed the globe
from his base in Paris, seeking to redefine theatrical truth, aiming for a
form of story-telling that transcends national cultures to tap into the
universal. In the course of these often far-flung journeys – both
geographical and artistic – he has delivered some of the key productions of
the late 20th century, providing a continuous challenge to theatrical
practice. He is widely acknowledged as the greatest theatre director in the
world today, though there are those who feel that his supreme talent, his
genius, has been misapplied, leading the theatre not closer to its true
function but in the opposite direction, into aestheticism and mysticism.

There are also those who feel that he has betrayed, or at least walked away
from, his particular talent. Kenneth Tynan, in his diary (not quoted in
Michael Kustow’s authorised biography), cries: “How I wish Peter would stop
tackling huge philosophical issues and return to the thing he can do better
than any other English director: startle us with stage magic.” He has been
at the heart of the often furious debate about the purpose of the theatre.
It is Kustow’s aim in this indispensable book to trace the trajectory of
Brook’s crucial contribution to the discussion, both in his writings and in
his productions. He succeeds brilliantly, and I defy anyone to read the book
and not come away thinking better of the theatre, its scope, its passion,
its contribution.

Kustow has had access first of all to Brook himself, an elusive interviewee,
and to a fascinating correspondence with his childhood friend Stephen Facey,
both of which illuminate the narrative. The book is chastely free of gossip
and often omits some of the human mess that accompanies experiment of any
sort, including some of the crises that Brook himself records in his
autobiography Threads of Time .

The Brook whom Kustow presents to us, though altogether exceptional, is not
especially complex. His early life was one of material comfort, intellectual
stimulation and constant encouragement, although as the son of Russian Jews,
he was conscious of being different from his fellow students at public
school. He was blessed with a relationship with his father that was wholly
positive, as a result of which, he says, he knew nothing “of the rejection
of the father figure that is so much part of our time”. His intellectual
precocity was encouraged (he read War and Peace at the age of nine) but not
unduly spotlit; he knew his worth.

There is no hint of neurosis about him. Wholly lacking in the Englishman’s
habitual instinct of apologising for his very existence, he took to the
theatre with easy and instant mastery. While at Oxford, he directed Doctor
Faustus , tracking down the aged Aleister Crowley to advise on the magic,
thinking nothing of consorting with “the wickedest man in England”. In the
absence of women he plunged with comfortable sensuality into “every
homosexual affair I could”, until finally deciding, as he character
istically puts it, that female genitals were more congenial to him than
male. No sooner had he come down from Oxford than he directed a production
of Cocteau’s Infernal Machine , hopping over to Paris for a chat with the
author. He was swiftly taken up by Willie Armstrong of the Liverpool Rep and
Barry Jackson of Birmingham, where he first worked with Paul Scofield. He
was not yet 21. He then went to Stratford with Jackson and Scofield with a
striking Watteau-inspired Love’s Labours Lost; he became ballet
correspondent for the Observer, and – at his own suggestion – director of
productions at the Royal Opera House, directing a fine Boris Godunov , (in
the repertory until the 1980s), and a Salomé designed by Salvador Dalí
(which proved one provocation too many). He was now 23. And so it went on,
an unrelenting crescendo of success in the West End, at Stratford, in
France, on Broadway, at the Metropolitan Opera House, across the whole
spectrum of the theatre of the 1950s; he was unstoppable.

“For my first 30 years,” Brook says, “I had nothing to connect with the
phrase ‘inner life’. What was ‘inner life’? There was life. Everything was
100% extrovert.” At some point during this period, he came upon the writings
of Peter Damian Ouspensky and, through him, the teaching of the Armenian
avatar Gurdjieff, finding in it a view of the universe which accorded with
his own understanding of himself, one based on a concept of life as the
constant interplay of energies in which human personality often stood as an
obstacle to experience of the real world. He absorbed this teaching into his
life, submitting to its exercises and to the tough challenges of a teacher
who persuaded him of “my own essen tial ordinariness”. Kustow says of this
commitment: “Brook was seeking to master the maelstrom of his life.
Gurdjieff promised him a way through his hothouse of emotions. He gave him a
map of his desires.”

By his mid-30s he started to want to break out of the theatre of which he
himself had been such a supreme exponent. He had always held himself
separate from his contemporaries, standing outside the mainstream post-war
British tradition of his generation – the rep, the university (he had
fastidiously refrained from joining the Oxford University Dramatic Society),
the socialist movement, and he regarded the Royal Court revolution as narrow
and insular. He now permanently renounced the boulevard, joining Peter
Hall’s new Royal Shakespeare Company, though not without misgivings that it
was merely intending “to do good things very well, the traditional target of
liberal England”. If he was to be part of it, he must have his own
experimental studio. His work there, inspired by Antonin Artaud’s notion of
the Theatre of Cruelty, pushed and probed into the extremes of experience
and expression, culminating in his overwhelming account of Peter Weiss’
Marat/Sade, a tour-de-force of staging as well as perhaps the most advanced
instance of company work ever seen in England. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was
like an enormous whoop of joy after this sustained exploration of the dark.

Aged 40, he suddenly told his friend Facey that he now wanted “to face
inwards rather than outwards”. It is of the subsequent years that Kustow
writes most brilliantly. The book warms up enormously as it goes on – as if
the early Brook, the bobby dazzler, was a little alien to Kustow, who
documents his young stardom conscientiously but without enthusiasm. It is
the later search that grips Kustow, the quest for new forms, new language,
new relationships with unimagined audiences: the company at the Bouffes du
Nord; the treks to Africa; the engagement with epic texts from ancient
cultures. Sometimes Brook would assert his genius for staging – would for a
moment become again, as Richard Findlater put it after Orghast at
Persepolis, “the arch-magician, a self-renewing Prospero, with enough of
Puck in him to change his staff in time before it is snapped by theory” –
but much of his work was directed towards defining a new kind of acting:
“effortless transparency, an organic presence beyond self, mind or body such
as great musicians attain when they pass beyond virtuosity”. The work he
produced under this dispensation has been often ravishing, illuminating,
provocative; it has also often been somewhat mild in its effect. There would
have been no place for an Olivier or a Scofield in these productions.

The “hell of night and darkness” that Kustow discerns in Brook’s early and
middle work seems to have dissolved, along with the “deeply rooted
aggression and anguish” in his psyche. Perhaps it is not so much that they
were within him, as that he had an exceptional ability to be the conduit of
what was around him. Now, in his 80s, he seems less engaged, quite
understandably, with the world about him, and more concerned with distilling
the essentials of what he conceives theatre – and man – to be.

In the 1960s, Brook had demanded a neo-Elizabethan theatre “which passes
from the world of action to the world of thought, from down-to-earth reality
to the extreme of metaphysical enquiry without effort and without
self-consciousness”. This is what we all long for; alas, Brook’s own work
since he formulated the demand has not been able to satisfy it. He has gone
for something quite different. But his has been a unique and a necessary
voice, reminding us that the price of a theatre that is truly alive is
perpetual vigilance.

· Simon Callow’s Shooting the Actor is published by Vintage.