Brook

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

For those of you familiar with Peter Brook’s body of work, this post will be very basic. For students or people new to the theatre world, he is one of the acknowledged masters whose work should be studied. We all can benefit from the experiences of someone who has had such a long and widely influential career.

Peter Brook is probably one of the most influential directors of the 20th Century. He has had an impact on the study of theatre since the late 60s, with the publishing of his first book “The Empty Space”. I remember my first reading of it at age 19 and realizing the boundaries I had placed around what I thought was theatre. In graduate school we examined his Mahabharata. As an instructor, all of us in the department took our students down to Seattle to see his Hamlet in 2002.

Brook’s work stands apart, whether you like it or not. The first of his books, “The Empty Space” is a reflection of the reductionist attitude he adopts in this first, and probably most influential of his books. I like to think of him as a kind of chemist who has identified the four basic elements of what theatre is made. Going back to read The Empty Space is an opportunity to get re-acquainted with the Brook “periodic table” consisting of the Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate theatres. The next four posts will be notes and questions from each of the chapters. Here is a good page featuring his bio.

One of his most widely acclaimed and criticized works, The Mahabharata, has sparked debate on intercultural collaboration and cultural appropriation. Here is an excellent article on the exigencies of intercultural and intersemiotic translation for any readers familiar with the play or who may have seen the film.

Other Reading: