Showman and philosopher
Rupert Christiansen
PETER BROOK by Michael Kustow Bloomsbury, £25, pp. 352, ISBN 0747576467 ✆ £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 When I interviewed Peter Brook a couple of years ago, he rather shockingly admitted that he had become bored by the theatre. Although rehearsing a play remained an absorbing joy, he said, he could hardly endure a performance. Yet he could sit rapt in front of any trashy old movie. He put this down to a fundamental restlessness in his nature: the motion in the pictures fascinates him.
Restlessness is certainly the quality that dominates Michael Kustow’s informed and readable biography of a remarkable man who turns 80 this year. Don’t call him a guru because he hates the word, but there is no doubt that for half a century Brook has been the theatre’s spiritual leader, not only its most brilliant showman but also its dominant philosopher, using plays as vehicles for a Gurdjieffian journey into the self and our deepest human dilemmas.
The restlessness has driven many reinventions of his directorial art. Born of comfortably prosperous Russian-Jewish émigrés ambitious for his precocious genius (he read War and Peace when he was nine), he was educated at Gresham’s, Holt — the school which in the same era also nurtured Auden and Britten — and went up to Oxford, in the words of his contemporary Kenneth Tynan, ‘rather like a high-pressure executive arriving to take over a dying business’.
A forceful Pooh-Bah bossiness helped: he never seems to have doubted his talents, and by the time he was 20 he had produced both plays and films which got him noticed. Then came his poetically Watteauesque Love’s Labour’s Lost at Stratford and a sensational if short-lived appointment as Director of Productions at the Royal Opera House.
In the early 1950s, he tossed off triumphs in the West End world of Binkie Beaumont and Oliver Messel, and made a 75-minute television film of King Lear with Orson Welles (has it survived?). There was a sensational Titus Andronicus with Olivier, and a hugely successful musical, Irma la Douce. His inventive, exuberant theatricality was every bit as revolutionary as Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger, and it kept on springing surprises.
The Sixties led him to the heart of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was infected by the new radicalism, experimenting with the anarchist precepts of Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ in US and Marat/Sade, as well as directing defining productions of King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After three years travelling the world with his own company, developing the Orghast project with Ted Hughes, followed by the epic production of The Mahabharata, he came to a sort of resting place in the Bouffes du Nord, a run-down music hall in a largely Islamic area of Paris.
Here he remains, honing and distilling a visually simple theatre focused on universal stories, mostly staged with a dedicated group of idealistic actors drawn from around the world. Profoundly honoured for his wisdom, he has been immeasurably influential on a younger generation of directors, Deborah Warner and Declan Donnellan among them, The impression one draws from Kustow’s book is that Brook’s life has followed an enviably easy trajectory. He has known no unusual personal tragedy, illness or major setback. A terrific womaniser in his youth, he appears to have been blessed in a stable family life with his only wife, the actress Natasha Parry, and their two children. Maybe his film career (Moderato Cantabile, Lord of the Flies, Meetings with Remarkable Men) has been a mild disappointment, but he is hardly someone to lust after multi-million dollar budgets and Oscar nominations.
What’s the secret? Gurdjieffian Sufism, one guesses, gives him serenity but also confidence. Gentle in manner, he is no soft touch. He commands loyalty, he does not waste his energies, his spirituality is fundamentally practical. Behind his famously penetrating blue eyes lurks something finely calculating. Peter Hall remarks that ‘to ask him for help on a relatively minor matter was a total waste of time’; Glenda Jackson says that ‘no’ is the first word which comes to mind when she thinks about working with him: ‘where he’s absolutely brilliant, I think, is that he cuts you off if you’re going down the wrong way. He just stops it dead.’ Kustow’s book has been written with Brook’s full co-operation, and its tone is respectful, if not tactful. The personal life is treated rather cagily (the only significant mistake I spotted is the confusion over the birthdate of his daughter Irina, herself now a good director), and the author probably underestimates the role played in his activities by the regiment of strong women who have always surrounded him — his wife, his assistant Nina Soufy, his collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, his agent Micheline Rozan, his tutors in Gurdjieff, Jane Heap and Jeanne de Salzmann.
Kustow prints David Hare’s bitter if unconvincing attack on Brook’s ‘fear of political commitment’, but otherwise lets his more recent work off the hook. Those of us who thrilled to it in the Sixties and Seventies can only be disappointed in the way it seems to have hardened into something like a minimalistic formula devoid of that most fundamental of theatrical virtues — the fresh shock of the unexpected. Has he really lost interest? Has the sage become a cynic? On his 80th birthday, one wants to hail him with Diaghilev’s injunction to Cocteau —‘Etonne-moi!’ — and hope that he still has the restlessness to set off on another journey and do something different.
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