{"id":1445,"date":"2022-07-20T09:21:32","date_gmt":"2022-07-20T07:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grenoble-oxford.org\/?p=1445"},"modified":"2022-09-19T16:18:04","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T14:18:04","slug":"peter-brook-british-stage-directing-great-dies-aged-97","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grenoble-oxford.org\/index.php\/2022\/07\/20\/peter-brook-british-stage-directing-great-dies-aged-97\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Brook : British stage directing great dies aged 97."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Peter Brook, one of the most creative and controversial stage directors of post-war Britain, has died aged 97.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in London, his stage productions, starring some of theatre’s most distinguished thespians, both enthralled and shocked audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His career took in Shakespeare plays, Broadway musicals and cinema, including an adaptation of Lord of the Flies<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brook, who had lived in France since 1974, died in Paris on Saturday, according to reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter Stephen Paul Brook was born in west London in March 1925, the son of Jewish immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He did not have a theatrical background, but after studying at Oxford University his talent was quickly spotted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By his mid-20s he had a reputation as the grand old enfant terrible of the British stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the ensuing decades Brook put his stamp on the theatre, breaking many established conventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the age of 20 he was appointed director of Birmingham Repertory Theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He soon moved on to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and then to the Royal Opera House where, as director of productions in the late 1940s, his work included La Boheme<\/em> and Salome<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brook was subsequently director at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He later told the BBC that he regarded British post-war theatre as having become “old-fashioned, stereotyped and in the hands of a small number of very conventional people who did Shakespeare in the most boring way imaginable”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the 1950s he continued to direct RSC productions featuring some of the greatest actors of the age including John Gielgud, Paul Scofield and Laurence Olivier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was responsible for a number of distinguished productions in London, New York, Paris and elsewhere – plays by TS Eliot, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as Shakespeare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was heavily influenced by Antonin Artaud’s ideas for a Theatre of Cruelty, putting on a season of plays in London in 1964.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His production of the Peter Weiss play, Marat\/Sade<\/em>, originally staged in London, was well received on Broadway and won Brook a Tony award for Best Director in 1966.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His 1970 production for the RSC was a memorable, airborne version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/em> using trapezes and stilts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was an attempt to capture the strangeness of a play about dreams, fairies and spurned lovers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Film career<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Controversially, in the 1970s he turned his back on English theatre and moved to Paris where he founded the International Centre of Theatre Research, an experimental theatre company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With it, he visited many countries and put on productions for a variety of audiences, including one for drug addicts, and another for mental patients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One memorable production, staged in France, Australia and America, was The Conference of the Birds<\/em>, from a medieval Persian poem. In Australia it was staged in a quarry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the major works he directed was The Mahabharata<\/em>, a nine-hour dramatisation of a Sanskrit epic, which was presented in several countries before coming to Glasgow in 1988.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brook made a number of films, including Lord of the Flies<\/em> in 1963, and The Tragedy of Carmen <\/em>– the stage production of which had won awards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was also responsible for a big screen adaptation of his production of King Lear<\/em>, released in 1971 and starring Paul Scofield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2012 a documentary, The Tightrope<\/em>, directed by his son, Simon, examined Brook’s directing style, using hidden cameras so the actors would not be distracted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title referred to Brook’s habit of getting his actors to walk across a carpet on an imaginary tightrope, doing whatever they fancied but conveying the impression they were high up in the air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has been said that Brook was more interested in ideas than anything else. He seemed to have a desire to shock and had been described as an astounding combination of insight, intuition and effrontery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brook married the actress Natasha Parry in 1951. She died in 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adapted from BBC 03\/07\/2022 by Susan Blatt\u00e8s ” i was fortunate enough to get to see his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/em> in Manchester, many years ago”<\/p>\n\n\n\n