Director Peter Brook Dies at 97

Peter Brook, a theatre legend and one of the most influential directors of the 20th century, has died.

The 97-year-old theatre maestro was born in Britain but spent much of his career in France, at the helm of his Parisian theatre Les Bouffes du Nord, where he reinvented the art of directing, favouring refined forms rather than traditional decorations. The news of his death, reported by Le Monde, was confirmed by sources in his entourage.

“The spirit, this immaterial matter impossible to justify and to show, is the only justification for the theatrical event”, Peter Brook, one of the greatest figures of the international theatrical scene, has always affirmed, and today he passes away at the age of 97 (he was born on March 21, 1925), with all the richness of his work, the most mythical.

It would be enough to remember his 'Marat-Sade' by Weiss in the mid-60s and then the colossal 'Mahabarata', a show for Avignon in 1985 which later also became a film and recently a graphic novel.

“The tightrope is the image that best represents my idea of ​​theater,” he declared, adding “I don’t want to teach anything, I’m not a master, I don’t have theories.” For him, the important thing has always been the impression, to trigger the imagination, which the freer it is, the more essential and strong the starting point.

Brook has always strived to make every artifice disappear from the scene, to ensure that the diaphragm between life and art is overcome, practically cancelling the concept of fiction in the face of the revelation of a profound existential truth.

Thus with him the theatre became an intimate collective experience of life, because "when a group of people is gathered for a very intense event, which must express everything that a great author can give in poetry, the spirit becomes tangible as it is tangible that this impression cannot be had in solitude and its meaning for everyone is that life can be lived".

Theatre has been a part of Brook's life since he was a boy, he directed his first play at 18 and then made his mark as an interpreter of Shakespeare's works, so much so that he became, first, director of London's Royal Opera House and, in 1962, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he combined the classics with a series of modern works and experimental works inspired in particular by Artaud's "theatre of cruelty", such as the very famous "Marat-Sade" by Peter Weiss and "Us", a work that referred to the violence of the Vietnam War and ended "scandalously" with a strong sign, burning a butterfly alive.

In 1970 he moved to France and founded the Centre international de creation thetrale in Paris, where, under the influence of Grotowski and J. Beck's Living Theatre, the possible theatrical applications of a non-significant, improvised and maximally gestural language were experimented.

He travels extensively in Africa, improvising shows in the most remote places. Then he returns to Paris where he opens Les Bouffes du Nord and begins to think and work, also with a long stay in India, on the 'Mahabarata', which will become a poetic and rigorous nine-hour show, set in a stone quarry, a Hindu poem of 70 thousand verses on the origin of the world and its confusion and uncertainty, restoring, in a babel of languages ​​and races, the profound truth without losing its sense of fable.

Since then he has never stopped touring the world with his shows, from the ironic, playful and melancholic ones linked to his longing for Africa such as 'Sizwe Banzi est mort' by Fougard or 'The suit', a stage adaptation of a novel by the South African Chan Themba, to a surprising invention such as his 'Carmen', created in 1986 on a land base, transforming theatres into arenas, with spectators only in the balconies or on the stage, seeking the authentic spirit of the character of Me'rime'e and reducing Bizet's opera almost to a chamber work, with fifteen instrumentalists and without a mystical gulf.

Moreover, his Mozartian 'Magic Flute', dreamed of for years and which arrived almost as a testament in 2011 at the Piccolo in Milan, made use of a single piano, a symbolic fairy tale, light and profound, which now remains a bit like the exemplary summa of Brook's theories and theatre, of his 'empty stage space' in which intuition leads to distilling the meaning of the work through the body and voice of the actors of all cultures.

A work carried out until the end as his sixth time just in November 2021 in Solomeo, Umbria, with La Tempesta revisited in his own way, with an invisible direction and at the same time very accurate in the details, paired with Marie-He' le' ne Estienne.