What do I know about him?

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(...) indeterminate, instantaneous, unpredictable, even if it necessitates the reunion of a set of clearly determined conditions. The director’s role consists of working at great length and in detail to prepare the actors, thus enabling the emergence of the theatrical event. All attempts to anticipate or predetermine the theatrical event are doomed to failure: the director cannot substitute him/herself for the audience. The triangle comprising ‘inner life of the actors—their relations with their partners—the audience’s consciousness’ can only be engendered at the actual moment of performance. The collective entity that is the audience makes the conciliatory element indispensable to the birth of the theatrical event: ‘(An audience’s) true activity can be invisible, but also indivisible.’

However invisible it is, this active participation by the audience is nonetheless material and potent: ‘When the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear toured through Europe, the production was steadily improving… The quality of attention that this audience brought expressed itself in silence and concentration: a feeling in the house that affected the actors as though a brilliant light were turned on their work.’ So it is evident why Brook’s research work tends towards ‘… a necessary theatre, one in which there is only a practical difference between actor and audience, not a fundamental one.’ The space in which the interaction between audience and actors takes place is infinitely more subtle than that of ideas, concepts, prejudices or preconditioning. The quality of the attention of both audience and actors enables the event to occur as a full manifestation of spontaneity. Ideally this interaction can transcend linguistic and cultural barriers. The C.I.R.T. actors can communicate just as well with African villagers, Australian aborigines or the inhabitants of Brooklyn; ‘Theatre isn’t about narrative. Narrative isn’t necessary. Events will make the whole.’

Many of the confusions concerning the problem of ‘spontaneity’ appear to have their source in a linear, mono-dimensional conception of the theatrical event. One can easily believe in the existence of laws such as Zeami’s johakyu, but that is insufficient in understanding how a theatrical event can take place through the transition between the different elements of johakyu. If one limits oneself to a strictly horizontal view of the action of johakyu (jo, the beginning: ha, the development: kyu, the ending), it is impossible to understand how one might arrive, for example, at the ultimate refinement of the ha part of ha, or to a paroxystic peak in the kyu part of kyu. What can produce the dynamic ‘shocks’ necessary for the movement not to stop, not to become blocked? How can the necessary continuity of a theatrical performance be reconciled with the discontinuity inherent in its different components? How can one harmonise the progression of the play, the actors’ work and the perception liberated in the audience?

In other words, horizontal movement is meaningless by itself. It remains on the same level forever, no information is forthcoming. This movement only acquires a significance if it is combined with an evolutionary dynamic. It is s if each phenomenon in reality were subject, at every moment, to two contradictory movements, in two opposing directions: one ascending, the other descending. As if there were two parallel rivers, flowing with considerable force in two opposing directions: in order to pass from one river to the other, an external intervention—a ‘shock’—is absolutely essential. This is where the full richness of the significance of the notion of ‘discontinuity’ is revealed.

But in order for this ‘shock’ to be effective, a certain concordance or overlap must exist between the ‘shock’ (which in itself is subject to the law of johakyu) and the system upon which it is acting. Therefore it becomes clear why each element of johakyu must be composed in turn of the three other elements—in other words, why there has to be a jo-ha-kyu sequence within the jo, the ha and the kyu. These different components enable interaction between the different systems to take place.

Therefore, in order for a harmonious movement to appear, a new dimension must be present: johakyu is not only active horizontally, but also vertically. If each element (jo, ha and kyu) is composed in turn of three other elements, therefore we obtain nine elements, two of which represent a sort of ‘interval.’ One of these is filled by the ‘shock’ enabling the horizontal transition to take place, the other by the ‘shock’ enabling the vertical transition to take place. In this way, one ends up with a vision of the action of Zeami’s johakyu which is very close to the precise mathematical formulation Gurdjieff elaborated for his ‘law of Seven’ or ‘octave law.’

When one considers this two-dimensional vision of the action of johakyu, Peter Brook’s insistence on the audience’s central role in a theatrical event becomes clearer. The audience can follow the suggestions proposed to it by the playtext, the actors and the director. The first interval—between jo and ha—can be traversed by means of a more or less automatic exchange, the play can continue its horizontal movement. But the audience also has its own irreducible presence: its culture, its sensitivity, its experience of life, its quality of attention, the intensity of its perception. A ‘resonance’ between the actors’ work and the audience’s inner life can occur. Therefore the theatrical event can appear fully spontaneous, by means of vertical exchange—which implies a certain degree of will and of awareness—thereby leading to something truly new, not pre-existent in theatrical performance. The ascent of the action of johakyu towards the play’s summit—the kyu of kyu—can therefore take place. The second interval is filled by a true ‘shock,’ allowing the paradoxical coexistence of continuity and discontinuity.

We have described what could be considered to be a first level of perception in a theatre event. This analysis could be further refined by taking into account the tree-like structure (it is never ending) of johakyu. Different levels of perception, structured hierarchically in a qualitative ‘ladder,’ could be discovered in this way. There are degrees of spontaneity, just as there are degrees of perception. The ‘quality’ of a theatrical performance is determined by the effective presence of these degrees.

We have also referred to a vertical dimension in the action of johakyu. This dimension is associated with two possible impulses: one ascending (evolution), the other descending (entropic involution). The ascending curve corresponds to a densification of energy, reflecting the tendency towards unity in diversity and an augmentation of awareness. It is in this sense that we have described the action of johakyu until this point.

But one might well conceive of a johakyu in reverse, such as appears, for example, in the subject of Peter Brook’s film Lord of the Flies, where one witnessed the progressive degradation of a paradise towards a hell. An ideal, innocent space exists nowhere. Left to themselves, without the intervention of ‘conscience’ and ‘awareness,’ the ‘laws of creation’ lead inexorably towards fragmentation, mechanicity, and, in the final instance, to violence and destruction. In this way spontaneity is metamorphosed into mechanicity.

It should be noted that ‘spontaneity’ and ‘sincerity’ are closely linked. The usual moral connotation of ‘sincerity’ signifies its reduction to an automatic functioning based on a set of ideas and beliefs implanted into the collective psyche in an accidental way through the passage of time. In this sense, ‘sincerity’ comes close to a lie, in relation to itself. By ridding ourselves of the ballast of what does not belong to us, we can eventually become ‘sincere’: recognising laws, seeing oneself, opening oneself to relationships with others. Such a process demands work, a significant degree of effort: ‘sincerity must be learnt.’ In relation to our usual conception of it, this kind of ‘sincerity’ resembles ‘insincerity’: ‘with its moral overtones, the word (sincerity) causes great confusion. In a way, the most powerful feature of the Brecht actors is the degree of their insincerity. It is only through detachment that an actor will see his own cliches.’ The actor inhabits a double space of false and true sincerity, the most fruitful movement being an oscillation between the two: ‘The actor is called upon to be completely involved while distanced—detached without detachment. He must be sincere, he must be insincere: he must practice how to be insincere with sincerity and how to lie truthfully. This is almost impossible, but it is essential…’

The actor’s predicament is reminiscent of Arjuna’s perplexity when confronted with the advice that Krishna gives him, in the Bhagavad Gita, to reconcile action and non-action: paradoxically, action undertaken with understanding becomes intertwined with inaction.

At every moment, the actor is confronted with a choice between acting and not-acting, between an action visible to the audience and an invisible action, linked to his/her inner life. Zeami drew our attention to the importance of intervals of non-interpretation or ‘non-action,’ separating a pair of gestures, actions or movements:

“It is a spiritual concentration which will allow you to remain on your guard, retaining all of your attention, at that moment when you stop dancing or chanting, or in any other circumstances during an interval in the text or in the mimic art. The emotion created by this inner spiritual concentration—which manifests itself externally—is what produces interest and enjoyment… It is in relation to the degree of non-consciousness and selflessness, through a mental attitude in which one’s spiritual reality is hidden even from oneself, that one must forge the link between what precedes and what follows the intervals of non-action. This is what constitutes the inner strength which can serve to reunite all ten thousand means of expression in the oneness of the spirit.”

It is only by mastering the attitudes and associations produced in this way that the actor can truly ‘play parts,’ putting him/herself in others’ places. ‘At every moment,’ wrote Gurdjieff, ‘associations change automatically, one evoking another, and so on. If I am in the process of playing a part, I must be in control all the time. It is impossible to start again with the given impulse.’68 In a sense a free man is one who can truly ‘play parts.’

In the light of all that has been said so far in this essay, would it not now be possible to state that there is a very strong relationship between theatrical and spiritual work? Whether one agrees or not, a clear and important distinction between theatre research and traditional research must be made in order to avoid the source of an indefinite chain of harmful confusions, which in any case have already coloured certain endeavours in the modern theatre.

Traditional research addresses itself to man as a whole, calling into play a wide range of aspects, infinitely richer than that of theatre research: after all, the latter’s end is aesthetic. Traditional research is closely linked with an oral teaching, untranslatable into ordinary language. Isn’t it significant that no traditional writings ever describe the process of self-initiation? In his ‘Third Series,’ faced with the impossibility of the task, Gurdjieff preferred to destroy his manuscript—what was eventually
published as Life is real only then, when ‘I am’ is only a collection of fragments from that manuscript. On several occasions, Saint John of the Cross announced a treatise on the ‘mystical union,’ but no trace has ever been found of such a work.
Finally, ‘Attar devoted the major part of his poem Conference of the Birds to the story of the discussions between the birds and a description of the preparation for their journey: the journey itself and the meeting with the Simorgh only take up a few lines.

Theatre research clearly has another end in mind: art, theatre. Peter Brook himself has strongly emphasised the need for such a distinction: ‘theatre work is not a substitute for a spiritual search.’69 In itself the theatrical experience is insufficient to transform the life of an actor. Nevertheless, like a savant, for example, or indeed any human being, the actor can experience
fleetingly what could be ‘a higher level of evolution.’ Theatre is an imitation of life, but an imitation based upon the concentration of energies released in the creation of a theatre event. So one can become aware, on an experiential level, of the full richness of the present moment. If theatre is not really the decisive meeting with oneself and with others, it nonetheless allows for a certain degree of exploration to take place.

This fundamental ambiguity recurs in Grotowski’s approach, at least such as it is described by Brook: ‘The theatre, he believes, cannot be an end in itself: like dancing or music in certain dervish orders, the theatre is a vehicle, a means for self-study, self-exploration…’ According to Brook’s conception of the theatre, it cannot lay claim to unity, in terms of its end. Of course one can arrive at certain privileged moments; ‘At certain moments, this fragmented world comes together, and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life. The marvel of being one.’ But theatre work is ephemeral, subject to the influences (both evoluted and involuted) of the environment. This impermanence prevents it from leading to ‘points of dynamic concentration.’ In answer to a question about Orghast, Brook replied that theatre work is:

“… self destructive within waves… You go through lines and points. The line that has gone through Orghast should come to a point, and the point should be a work …obviously there is a necessary crystallising of the work into a concentrated form. It’s always about that—coming to points of concentration.”

On the Possibility of a Universal Language

When A.C.H. Smith asked him about the possibility of a ‘universal language,’ Peter Brook dismissed the question as being meaningless. His response reflects a fear of the stifling of a vital question by endless theoretical considerations, by deforming and maiming abstractions. How many prejudices and cliches are unleashed automatically simply by pronouncing the two words ‘universal language’? And yet Brook’s entire work testifies to his search for a new language which endeavours to unite sound, gesture and word, and in this way to free meanings which could not be expressed in any other way. But above all this research is experimental: something living emerges into the theatre space, and it matters little what name one gives to it. ‘What happens,’ Brook asks, ‘when gesture and sound turn into word? What is the exact place of the word in theatrical expression? As vibration? Concept? Music? Is any evidence buried in the structure of certain ancient languages?’

The fact that, by themselves, words cannot provide total access to reality has been well known for a long time. In the final analysis, any definition of words by words is based on indefinite terms. Where does linguistic determinism begin, and where does it end? Can it be characterised by a single value, by a finite number of values or by an infinite number? And if, according to Korzybski’s famous phrase, ‘the map is not the territory,’ it nevertheless has the considerable advantage of a structure similar to that of the territory. How can this similarity become operative? The word is a small visible portion of a gigantic unseen formation,’ writes Brook.76 Starting with this ‘small visible portion,’ how can one gain access to the ‘gigantic formation’ of the universe as a whole? A theatrical event, as has already been suggested, determines the appearance of a laddered structure of different levels of perception. How can any single word encapsulate the sum of these levels?

The relativisation of perception has enabled us to specify a phenomenon’s place in reality, as well as how it is linked to the rest. A word, a gesture, an action are all linked to a certain level of perception, but, in the true theatrical event, they are also linked to other levels present in the event. Relativity allows us to uncover the invariance concealed behind the multiplicity of forms of phenomena in different systems of reference. This vision of things is close to that implied by the ‘principle of relativity’ formulated by Gurdjieff.

Relativity conditions vision: without relativity there can be no vision. The playwright who takes his/her own reality for reality as a whole presents an image of a desiccated and dead world, in spite of any ‘originality’ that he/she might have shown. ‘Unfortunately the playwright rarely searches to relate their detail to any larger structure—it is as though they accept without question their intuition as complete, their reality as all of reality.’ Death itself can be relativised in an acceptance of contradiction. Brook cites the example of Chekhov: ‘In Chekhov’s work, death is omnipresent… But he learnt how to balance compassion with distance… This awareness of death, and of the precious moments that could be lived, endow his work with a sense of the relative: in other words, a viewpoint from which the tragic is always a bit absurd.’ Non-identification is another word for vision.

Theatre work can be the constant search for a simultaneous perception, by both actors and audience, of every level present in an event. Brook describes his own research in this concise formulation:

“… the simple relationship of movement and sound that passes directly, and the single element which has the ambiguity and density that permits it to be read simultaneously on a multitude of levels—those are the two points that the research is all about.”

The principle of relativity clarifies what an eventual ‘universal language’ could be. For Gurdjieff, this new, precise, mathematical language had to be centered around the idea of evolution: ‘The fundamental property of this new language is that all ideas are concentrated around one single idea: in other words, they are all considered, in terms of their mutual relationships, from  the point of view of a single idea. And this idea is that of evolution. Not at all in the sense of a mechanical evolution, naturally, because that does not exist, but in the sense of a conscious and voluntary evolution. It is the
only possible kind… The language which permits understanding is based on the knowledge of its place in the evolutionary ladder.’ So the sacred itself could be understood to be anything that is linked to an evolutionary process.

This new language involves the participation of body and emotions. Human beings in their totality, as an image of reality, could therefore forge a new language. We do not only live in the world of action and reaction, but also in that of spontaneity and of self-conscious thought.

Traditional symbolic language prefigures this new language. When talking about different systems which convey the idea of unity, Gurdjieff said:

“A symbol can never be taken in a definitive and exclusive sense. In so far as it express the laws of unity in indefinite diversity, a symbol itself possesses an indefinite number of aspects from which it can be considered, and it demands from whoever
approaches it the capacity to see it from different points of view. Symbols that are transposed into the words of ordinary language harden, become less clear: they can quite easily become their own opposites, imprisoning meaning within dogmatic and narrow frame-works, without even permitting the relative freedom of a logical examination of the subject. Reason merely provides a
literal understanding of symbols, only ever attributing to them a single meaning.” 

The fact that a symbol possesses an indefinite number of aspects does not mean that it is imprecise at all. Indeed it is its reading on an indefinite number of levels which confers on it its extreme precision. Commenting on the theatre of Samuel Beckett, Brook writes:

“Beckett’s plays are symbols in an exact sense of the word. A false symbol is soft and
vague: a true symbol is hard and clear. When we say ‘symbolic’ we often mean something drearily obscure: a true symbol is specific, it is the only form a certain truth can take… We get nowhere if we expect to be told what they mean, yet each one has a relation with us we can’t deny. If we accept this, the symbol opens in us a great wondering O.”

It is clear therefore why Brook believes Chekhov’s essential quality to be ‘precision,’ and why he states that today ‘… fidelity is the central concern, an approach which necessitates weighing every single word and bringing it into sharp focus.’84 Only then can words have an influence: they can become active, bearers of real significance, if the actor behaves as a ‘medium,’
allowing words to act through and ‘colour’ him/her, rather than him/her trying to manipulate them.

By forgetting relativity, language has become in time inevitably narrower, diminished in its emotional and even intellectual capacities. It has been necessarily ‘bastardised’: one word is taken for another, one meaning for another. The Orghast experiment showed in a startling way that a return to an organic language, detached from the dread bonding of abstraction to abstraction, is possible. Words invented by the poet Ted Hughes and fragments performed in different ancient languages acted as catalysts to the reciprocal transformation between movement and sound, as an expression of an inner state, meaning no longer needing to be filtered solely through cerebral activity. In an interview with American Theatre, Brook emphasised that ‘actors, whatever their origin, can play intuitively a work in its original language. This simple principle is the most unusual thing that exists in the theatre…’

Evidently the relativisation of perception demands hard work, a considerable effort, an inner silence that is a sort of penitence. Silence plays an integral part in Brook’s work, beginning with the research into the inter-relationship of silence and duration with his Theatre of Cruelty group in 1964, and culminating in the rhythm punctuated with silences that is indefinitely present at the core of his film Meetings with Remarkable Men: ‘In silence there are many potentialities: chaos or order, muddle or pattern, all lie fallow—the invisible-made-visible is of sacred nature…’ Silence is all-embracing, and it contains countless ‘layers.’

One could suggest that events and silence constitute the fabric of any theatre performance. Silence comes at the end of action, as in Conference of the Birds: ‘A beautiful symbolic opposition is drawn between the black of the mourning material and the hues of the puppets. Colour disappears, all sparkle is suppressed, silence is established,’ observes Georges Banu.89 The richness of silence confuses, embarrasses and disturbs, and yet it is joy that is hidden within it, that ‘strange irrational joy’ that Brook detected in the plays of Samuel Beckett.

It is no coincidence that the words ‘empty space’ form the title of one of the two books on theatre Brook has ever published. One must create an emptiness, a silence within oneself, in order to permit the growth of reality’s full potentiality. This is what Tradition has always taught us.

Is silence the premonitory sign of a true ‘universal language’? In a passage in The Empty Space, Brook writes ‘… everything is a language for something and nothing is a language for everything.’ Is this ‘nothing’—‘formless,’ ‘bottomless,’ as Jacob Böhme called it—the basis of all form, process and event? And how can one reconcile this infinitely rich, formless silence with aesthetic form, other than through incessant search, continual investigation and pitiless questioning, relentlessly pursued along a
cutting edge? Perhaps it is above all ‘tightropes’ that are missing from contemporary artistic research:

“We can try to capture the invisible, but we must not lose touch with common sense… The model as always is Shakespeare. His aim continually is holy, metaphysical, yethe never makes the mistake of staying too long on the highest plane. He knew how hard it is for us to keep company with the absolute—so he continually bumps us down to earth… We have to accept that we can never see all of the invisible. So after straining towards it, we have to face defeat, drop down to earth, then start up again.”

Peter Brook is the only one to follow the path he has chosen. On such a path, there can be neither ‘sources’ nor absolute ‘models.’

If one accepts Korzybski’s suggestion, the history of human thought can be roughly divided into three periods, adopting as the basis for classification the relationship between the observer and what is observed. In the first period (‘pre-scientific’), the observer is everything, while what is being observed has little or no importance. In the second period (‘classical’ or ‘semi-scientific’), what is observed comprises the only important aspect: this ‘classical’ materialist tendency continues to dominate most areas of concern today. Finally, in the third period (‘scientific’—still embryonic at the present time), a period in which Peter Brook seems to us to be one of the boldest explorers, gradually it becomes clear that knowledge results from a unity between the observer and what is observed. An encounter with Tradition can only enrich and ennoble this conception of unity. For the theatre, such a meeting is not abstract or intellectual, but experimental. One could even suggest that theatre is a privileged field of study of Tradition.

At the end of this essay, perhaps one must confess that it seems impossible to approach Brook’s theatre work from a theoretical point of view. All that we can offer is a ‘reading,’ one of a multitude of other possibilities. In The Empty Space, Brook writes:

“Most of what is called theatre anywhere in the world is a travesty of a word once full of
sense. War or peace, the colossal bandwagon of culture trundles on, carrying each artist’s traces to the evermounting garbage heap… We are too busy to ask the only vital question which measures the whole structure: why theatre at all? What for?… Has the stage a real place in our lives? What function can it have? What could it serve?”

The question is still being asked.

http://www.experimentaltheatre.org/peter_brook.htm
04/08/08

More reviews and commentaries...

Peter Brook At Eighty

  by Charles Marowitz

 

  (Swans - June 6, 2005)   When I first met Peter Brook in the early sixties, he was just making that fateful transition from West End Wunderkind to avatar of the avant garde. For those who know him only in his latter guise, it may seem bizarre to imagine that he was a director who worked with performers like Clare Bloom, Pearl Bailey, Vivien Leigh, and Rex Harrison and staged commercial musicals such as "House of Flowers," "Irma la Douce" and the ill-fated Bond parody, "The Perils of Scobie Prilt," which may have been the only out-of-town production by Brook that never made it into London.

Always the conscious artist and painfully aware of the fact that there was a trendy public and a staid one, Peter was zealous about being associated with the former. It was that impulse that first drew him to Encore Magazine, a small circulation bi-monthly which had an influence out of all proportion to its minuscule readership. A magazine which, in the inchoate 1950s, was already championing Brecht, Artaud, Pinter and the dazzling new French ensembles like those of Jean Vilar and Roger Planchon.

I was one of its triumvirate of editors beavering away without pay for the greater glory of the New Wave, and it was there that I first came into contact with Peter. Both of us were, as he put it, "looking in the same direction, if not always seeing eye to eye." We corresponded about issues which appeared in various editions, found we shared an admiration for Antonin Artaud and eventually met up in person. He would often pump me about what members of the staff felt about this or that new production, the tacit assumption being that there was a hip way of viewing current events in the theatre and one that was more practiced and bourgeois. Rather than disillusion him, I refrained from explaining that some of the "hipper" members of Encore's inner circle were too doctrinal and dogmatic in their socialist beliefs to be able to deliver enlightened opinions about anything which wasn't heavily steeped in Marxism.

Out of these talks came an invitation to collaborate on the Jan Kott-inspired, Paul Scofield production of "King Lear" which Peter was readying for the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was duly taken on as Assistant Director and unofficial dramaturgist for a walloping twelve pounds a week and immediately entered the charmed circle which was then dominated by Brook, Peter Hall, Michel St. Denis, and John Barton. My main function in this venture was discussing with Peter the intellectual nuances of Shakespeare's play; why Edgar, brutally cobbled by his nefarious brother Edmund, decides to pretend to be a half-naked, maniac roaming the countryside; why Gloucester doesn't recognize his errant son when they meet in the hovel; how to prevent Regan and Goneril from becoming the twin "wicked sisters" of British pantomime, etc. etc. I delivered my copious notes on the production's progress, made two or three specific suggestions about interpretation but essentially was there as a kind of intellectual mascot to help Peter clarify his ideas about the most opaque classic in the Shakespearean canon. The other members of the company kept darting suspicious glances towards the young, bearded American who seemed to be a troubling, usually silent, presence during rehearsals; could he be a kind of company mole planted there to report esthetic transgressions to the Master?

What struck me most forcibly about Peter's work with the actors was that they were passionate about pleasing him. There was an enormous respect for this -- even then -- legendary theatre director, and all their offerings came out of a psychological context in which they would sooner impale themselves on naked spears than offer routine or sub-standard results to so demanding a director. I discovered that one of a director's most effective tools is the allegiance of a devoted company; but of course, to reap the artistic benefits of that allegiance, the director himself must first have accumulated a track record as impressive as Peter's.

Two incidents stand out from that rehearsal period. At one, the costume designer balked at Peter's requirement that the costumes for Lear's daughters be made out of real leather. Protesting the excessive cost of such an extravagance, he vociferously opted for "leatherette," a plasticized version of leather which would "read" as leather from the front, but Peter wasn't buying it. Real leather had a texture and swish to it which could not be duplicated by any cheaper substitute. The designer refused to approve the excessive cost and blurted out many of the stupid things irate designers say at rehearsals when their suggestions are repulsed. Peter, in a very low, balanced, and barely audible voice replied: "I am very angry about this," although nothing in his tone or manner betrayed any anger. He might just as well have been saying: "I see then we will have to agree to disagree" but what was pulsating beneath that placid, utterly calm façade was the swirling "anger" he was quietly declaring. He got his genuine leather.

At one rehearsal, there was a set of drums in the studio and Peter sat down behind them and started beating out different tattoos and cymbal clashes. "Wouldn't it be marvelous," he said, "if we could use rhythms like this as directions to actors, instead of words." It was a period when "the word" had fallen into disrepute and rooting out subterranean "sub-text" had an appeal that no linguistic construction, no matter how eloquent, could possibly equal. That was the way Peter's mind worked. It was constantly searching for alternative means of expressing ideas. It was that instinct which probably led him to Antonin Artaud's "Theatre and Its Double" and to our next collaboration which was the creation of a "Theatre of Cruelty Season" in a small theatrical adjunct to the Royal Shakespeare Company off Sloane Square where many of Artaud's more tantalizing ideas could be researched and tested.

Artaud had been one of my own early mentors and I, like many directors of that period, were intellectually bewitched by the ideas of the mad Frenchman who, in his early 40s, after a life willed with tragic failures, wound up in a mental institution at Rodez. I had produced one of the first documentaries on Artaud for the BBC and had written an article for The Evergreen Review about his malevolent incarceration under the oppressive domination of the psychiatrist Dr. Gaston Ferdiere. It was while preparing the Theatre of Cruelty Season (a term created by Artaud himself) that Peter and I delved deeply into the poet's writing to see how ideas he himself never managed to realize could be fleshed out using a hand-picked group of actors under the aegis of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).

I was instructed to cull from several hundred applicants an underpaid squad of twelve actors and actresses that would be given three months of rigorous training based on Artaudian precepts, without any actual production being slated. (The running joke was that the definition of "Theatre of Cruelty" was "twelve actors earning twelve pounds a week.") Among the new recruits was a sorely unemployed actress named Glenda Jackson and about a dozen other talented and adventurous performers ready to join and Peter and me in leaping into the deep end. Here, the collaboration changed radically. The improvisations, exercises, tests and tactics I devised for the actors, derived from work I had been doing with my own company, was alien territory to Peter and he was eager to sop it up. I could feel myself being excavated for tests, tactics, and techniques which were as novel to Peter as they were to the actors, but always with staunch encouragement and rabid curiosity. Improvisation was then something of a dirty word in the British theatre. The more stolid members of the RSC rejected it out of hand and when in 1963 William Gaskill tried to introduce it to members of The National Theatre Company in his production of Farquhar's "The Recruiting officer," one could feel the resistance, like a volt of electricity, shudder through the rehearsal room. Olivier, to his credit, broke the ice by saying: "Why not have a go?" and so a crude but self-conscious form of improv actually took place, although long after the event Olivier admitted it served no useful purpose in a context with traditionally trained, established West End actors. At the RSC Experimental Group, it was spoon-fed to twelve actors on a regular basis for three months and, because it was underwritten and encouraged by Peter, became a vital force in subsequent productions such as the opening surrealist revue which was labeled "Theatre of Cruelty Season," Genet's "The Screens" and later, the "Marat/Sade."

Throughout this period Peter was open to every innovation that emerged; expressing dramatic impulses using only paint on canvas, inventing sounds, cries and alternating rhythms, giving nonsense texts subtextual meaning which, though sometimes in gibberish, could still be communicated to an audience. It was an adventurous, startling, endlessly stimulating experience for all the members of this Dangerous Dozen and no one was more conducive to the bizarre, the exceptional, the outrageous and the "off the wall" than the man who, heretofore, had established a reputation as a talented and commercially respectable member of England's theatrical Establishment.

Peter was always the epitome of good sense, intellectual curiosity, and unpredictable innovation, but highly susceptible to betrayal. He had come up through the theatrical ranks easily but warily: "Easily" because he was already a theatrical luminary as a precocious undergraduate at Oxford, the breeding ground from which leaders of the British theatre were regularly cultivated; and "warily" because early in his career he had been exposed to the treacherous in-fighting that besets all theatre practitioners and had seen ambitious people use guile and trickery to further their own causes and try to outfox the competition. Peter felt, and probably still feels, that allegiance once offered and accepted forges an insoluble bond which should never be broken. In our case, that bond was frayed, if not actually broken, when as a critic in the late 1960s, I expressed a dim view of his anti-Vietnam farrago "US." One of the tenets of loyalty, it seemed, was restraint, and restraint meant not voicing negative criticism against those with whom one had previously been professionally involved. Now that he has escalated from "outstanding British director" to International Icon, I would imagine he has discarded much of that vulnerability. "Enemies" no longer exist that can possibly threaten either his status or his achievement. Peter has reached the point where even poor reviews cannot diminish the glitter of the work he deems to be worth undertaking.

Every artist is, consciously or unconsciously, eclectic. They alchemize ideas and inferences from other people's work into their own. Peter took many of Artaud's ideas and gave them a form they never had before; he worked closely with Jerzy Grotowsky and that minimalist approach to theatre unquestionably influenced his own scaled-down work on the classics. Several of his French productions most notably the "Mahabharata" have been filtered through his immersion in the ideas of Gurdjieff -- just as many of his earlier productions bear the circus-like influences of Meyerhold, a director we all know only by legendary report, although I know of no one who has actually beheld a Meyerhold production with his own eyes. But in the process of theatrical alchemy, once base metal has been transformed into gold, its former constituents no longer exist; it has been enriched by the metamorphosis into richer material, and that is the real point about Peter's achievements. He is the catalyst who, after effecting the changes that take place through catalysis, remains unchanged at the end. It is Peter's style and sensibility that emerges with pristine clarity, even when, on reflection, we detect trace-elements of other artists.

As he has entered his 80th year (he turned 80 on March 21, 2005), Peter reveals none of the creaky signs of the octogenarian. His latest work, "Tierno Bokar," is yet another excursion into what Michael Billington described as "timeless questions about the subversiveness of faith, the meaning of existence and the conflict of free will and destiny;" intellectual preoccupations he has been dealing with since "Caspar" and "Les Iks." The mind is bristlingly alive and the instinct to create is as ravenous as it ever was. The great advantage of being genuinely "avant garde" is that everyone else has to double-time in order to catch up with you. In theatres in both the East and the West, directors are still playing catch-up while Peter himself, surging forward, disappears behind a cloud of dust.

http://www.swans.com/library/art11/cmarow19.html

Just one more....I promise

 

The Empty Space by Peter Brook

I approached this book with certain misgivings, partly because to read a book about "The Theatre" in general, a subject so huge and ephemeral, promised to be as rewarding as "Sherlock on Death" or De Mille's promised "simple and undramatic film about the end of the world"; and partly because Peter Brook himself produces in me the mixed emotions of adulation and sheer fright. It would be interesting to read the book without knowing Brook, for knowing him, he breathed over my shoulder the whole way through and it was impossible to separate the book from the man - not, I hasten to say, that this was a drawback - but from a purely academic point of view it would have been interesting to read the book without the Presence.

Once embarked, however, the first fear was removed. The book is, first, foremost and thankfully, extremely readable. It speaks a language equally intelligible to the theatrical initiate and that old friend, "the Man in the Street" (and there's a subject for Brook). It is precise, clear, witty and all terms are well defined before use.

"The Empty Space" of the title is, of course, the stage, and in this book, Brook examines and analyses what we do, and what we could do, to fill it. Mercilessly, every type of theatre, the deadly, the holy, the rough (Brook's headings), is scrutinised and found wanting. He is scrupulously fair. The obvious butt for criticism in this field, the much lambasted commercial theatre, has its good points remarked as well as its bad, and the experimental and avant garde - as at present practised - are not spared a damning swipe or two.

After these examinations he moves on to the "immediate theatre," in which he formulates some ideals for filling his empty space, but carefully not lapsing into dogma at any moment: "As I continue to work, each experience will make these conclusions inconclusive again. It is impossible to assess the function of a book - but I hope this one my be of use somewhere . . . But if anyone were to try and use it as a handbook, then I can definitely warn him - there are no formulas" - and again: "As you read this book, it is already moving out of date. It is for me an exercise, now frozen on the page." What will, however, never be out of date is the lesson that breathes through every page, of the endless care, pain, time, devotion and sheer hard work that all concerned in the theatre should and must bring to it if it is to mean anything at all.

The overall impression - apart from fascination and a sense of privilege at getting a glimpse of this extraordinary man's mind - is of a rare objectivity. Not merely the theatre, but its inhabitants and those of its purlieus, actors, directors, designers and - God save the mark - critics, are skilfully and compassionately dissected, and the results arranged with clarity for us to form our own conclusions.

A handbook - in deference to the author's wish - no; but required reading for anyone who professes to care about the theatre.

Incidentally, I picked up the book at eleven o'clock in the evening, and laid it down, finished, at three thirty in the morning, and I could not have put it down before.

http://members.aol.com/xtralinks/pb/space.htm 04/08/08

 

 

Notes.

I have to write about:

• Gesture lines/centre of weight (stomach, pelvis, top of head, etc.) - Exercise at party setting, where people with different centre of mass interacted.
• States of tension (blob, cool/american, manager/neutral, aware, optimistic, pessimistic/paranoid, stasis)
• Exercise with paper bag on head using only body to show emotions.
• CLOCKING THE AUDIENCE & COUNTER MASKS: Exercise - "you find a millions dollars on the street (show different emotions but with the same facial expression)
• Trying masks on whilst audience asked you questions about your character (we had one only prop)
• MASK PERFORMANCE (discussing target audience, setting, characters, different plots) - OWN EXPERIENCES...

Linking all of them together!