Revered and influential theatre director who took drama out of the auditorium to stages and spaces all over the world
, the first of three historic RSC Brook productions that examined the compulsiveness of human cruelty and help, to this day, to define cultural London in the 60s., Peter Weiss’s virtuoso take on the terror in revolutionary France, and US , a company-devised show in reaction to the Vietnam war.
In hindsight, these lectures read like Brook’s farewell to Britain. There was no money – and no will – to fund a Peter Brook company whose prime purpose was not performance but experiment and research. French cultural policies were both more cosmopolitan and more open to risk-investment in the individual artist.
Glenda Jackson, centre, as the assassin Charlotte Corday in Peter Brook’s 1967 film Marat/Sade, adapted from his original production of Peter Weiss’s play.In Paris, Brook was kept above the swift stream of French cultural politics by his general manager, Micheline Rozan. In 1974, he and Rozan found the centre a permanent home for research and performance, in the derelict, mosque-like, an old variety house near the Gare du Nord.
Some critics – in India and America – dismissed it as “orientalist”, but audiences disagreed and wherever it played, it was both communal and transformative. As a theatre critic, I saw the cycle four times in three years – in the Rhone quarry outside Avignon where it began; at the Bouffes du Nord; in Brooklyn, where, translated into English, it drew le tout Manhattan; and finally in Glasgow, when it enabled the conversion of the former Museum of Transport into the Tramway arts space.
The result was an odyssey of inner adventures that exemplified Sacks’s own view that the broken-minded are the new heroes, standing on the frontier of the modern age. A quartet of superb performers – David Bennent, Yoshi Oida, Bruce Myers and– invested the experiment with a humanity further enriched by Brook’s use of video cameras and screens.
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