Letters from Vienna #125
In Memoriam Peter Brook
RIP Peter Brook 1925-2022
“My own schoolboy choices had wavered among becoming a diplomat, a foreign correspondent, and a secret agent,” Peter Brook once wrote “but at some point, the idea of being a director must have taken root in my mind. Maybe it started when at the age of ten I was sent for my health to stay as a paying guest with two spinster ladies by the sea. On the pier, there was what was called a “concert party” in which men in blazers, their faces blackened with soot, sang to ukuleles and tapped out soft-shoe routines. Armed with a banjo and clipped-on ginger moustache, I bullied, cursed and cajoled two little girls who were staying in the house into performing our own variety show, tasting for the first time the feverish excitement of being the boss. Even so, performing seemed a hobby, not a grown-up way of life. It was like the marionettes, the photography, and even the amateur filmmaking at school – there to make the daily miseries bearable.”
“Then all of a sudden it had become a career. “What are you going to be?” “A film director.” It is hard to say how or why…I recognised that formal education was of no interest whatever and at the age of sixteen I abruptly left school and returned home, announcing to my father that I was going to take classes in photography in London as the first step toward filmmaking. He listened patiently, then proposed a compromise. Through some business friends, he was sure he could get me a job in a documentary film studio on one condition: after a year, I was to go to university and be educated. I agreed and was admitted to Merton Park Studios in South London, astonished to discover that a studio was not, as I had fondly imagined, a new world of futuristic whiteness and silence but a scruffy area of piled up debris, in which fragments of parlours and suburban kitchens would only shine and gleam when the cameraman switched on his lamps. My job in the studios was unglamorous and disappointing – it was mainly sitting around – so I had plenty of time and energy to spare and cajoled an eccentric Italian maker of ballet shoes to turn the cellar under his shop into a theatre. Having persuaded a group of friends to join me, I began to rehearse a lurid Elizabethan play whose blood-drenched atmosphere had long fascinated me, “The Duchess of Malfi”. But within a few hours we managed to irritate the unpredictable shoemaker, and we were thrown into the street with a torrent of abuse. The project was abandoned, but my imagination refused to accept this, so I went around claiming that it had taken place, describing it, embellishing on the story, until I began to believe that the production had been received with triumph, bringing me both experience and glory. In 1942, when my apprenticeship in the studios ended and I eventually arrived at Oxford, I expected the university dramatic societies to welcome me with open arms, but I found that they were totally monopolised by possessive professors and well-entrenched third-year students who had no intention of yielding an inch of their territory to a newcomer. There was only one solution, which was to use the freedom of the summer vacation to work away from the university, where the powerful academics had no sway. So, I dragged my friends into another scheme, “Doctor Faustus”, which we put on in a tiny theatre near Hyde Park Corner…”
“We sold tickets to everyone we knew, even going from door to door in the suburbs and, as the war had still not come to an end, we said we were raising money for an Aid to Russia Fund. Fortunately, this happened to be true, and it gave our enterprise a certain respectability. As we made a small profit, we could even feel we were playing our part in the war effort.”
“When the new term began, I started the University Film Society, partly so that we could see the old silent films whose names were legends to us, but above all so as to produce a film of our own. At that time, the movie I admired the most was Sacha Guitry’s “Le Roman d’un tricheur”, and I saw in Lawrence Sterne’s eighteenth-century adventures of an amorous clergyman, “A Sentimental Journey”, the possibility of telling a story in the same free and insolent manner. I called again on the enthusiasm of my little group of friends, and pooling all our resources, we put together £250. Even in those days this was a small enough sum; besides, in wartime amateur filmmaking was totally discouraged, and it was illegal to sell sixteen-millimetre film. But we discovered a loophole: the Air Force had the right to dispose of film stock used in fighter planes to record the trace of bullets as they passed in between the propeller blades if part of the batch was dud. So, we acquired, very cheaply, rolls of film on which each shot in the camera was like a shot fired in Russian roulette – the chances of hitting unusable emulsion were dangerously high. There was also a strict regulation that no film laboratory could accept work that was not directly connected with the war, but this obstacle was soon bypassed when I chanced on a maker of pornographic movies off Oxford Street who had his own private processing plant…”[1]
It was only many years later that Brook was able to redefine theatre (after he’d abandoned film): “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”[2]
“The Deadly Theatre can at first sight be taken for granted,” he wrote “because it means bad theatre. As this is the form of theatre we see most often, and as it is most closely linked to the despised, much-attacked commercial theatre it might seem a waste of time to criticise it further. But it is only if we see that deadliness is deceptive and can appear anywhere, that we will become aware of the size of the problem.”[3]
In contrast to the Deadly Theatre was the Holy Theatre: “The Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible: the notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear has a deep hold on our thoughts. We are all aware that most of life escapes our senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognise when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes. We observe that the behaviour of people, of crowds, of history, obeys such recurrent patterns.”[4]
And of course, of equal, if not greater importance was what he termed “The Rough Theatre”: “It is always the popular theatre that saves the day. Through the ages it has taken many forms, and there is only one factor that they all have in common—a roughness. Salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that’s not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back: theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms, barns; the one-night stands, the torn sheet pinned up across the hall, the battered screen to conceal the quick changes— that one generic term, theatre, covers all this and the sparkling chandeliers too.”[5]
And not to be forgotten was the phenomenon he referred to as “Immediate Theatre”: “There is no doubt that a theatre can be a very special place. It is like a magnifying glass, and also like a reducing lens. It is a small world, so it can easily be a petty one. It is different from everyday life so it can easily be divorced from life. On the other hand, while we live less and less in villages or neighbourhoods, and more and more in open-ended global communities, the theatre community stays the same: the cast of a play is still the size that it has always been. The theatre narrows life down. It narrows it down in many ways. It is always hard for anyone to have one single aim in life—in the theatre, however, the goal is clear. From the first rehearsal, the aim is always visible, not too far away, and it involves everyone. We can see many model social patterns at work: the pressure of a first night, with its unmistakable demands, produce that working-together, that dedication, that energy and that consideration of each other’s needs that government despair of ever evoking outside wars.”[6]
The genius of Peter Brook and his extraordinary work will be sorely missed.
[1] pp. 22-25, Threads of Time, A Memoir, Peter Brook
[2] p.7 The Empty Space, Peter Brook
[3] p.8 Ibid
[4] p.49 Ibid
[5] p.78 Ibid
[6] p.120 Ibid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABthUm5fS-s&ab_channel=TextundB%C3%BChne
Thanks very much, Michael.