Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”. Chapter 4, The Immediate Theatre. The Immediate Theatre is the theatre of the fresh. In this chapter Brook generously positins himself as a fellow student of the art. The most valuable thing I have taken from this book, and that I continue to practice years later is a tolerance for ambiguity. This is largely...

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”. Chapter 3, The Rough Theatre. Rough Theatre is the theatre of torn edges, dirt, makeshift and make-do. In direct contrast to the Holy, the Rough gives more validity to down-to-earth crudeness than to the eloquence of prayer (p. 71). Brook reminds us that theatre can exist in an attic or a bombed out theatre...

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”. Chapter 2: The Holy Theatre Holy Theatre the theatre of the invisible made visible. Brook calls for a theatre that not only offers the possibility of presenting the “invisible” but also the conditions that make its perception possible. He presents four pioneers of the Holy; Merce Cuningham, Samuel Beckett,...

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”. Chapter 1: The Deadly Theatre. Reading Brook’s essay on The Deadly Theatre (even re-reading it after several years) is a bit like taking a splash of cold water in the face. The first of the four essays of “The Empty Space” is a wake up call where Brook describes the “best and the worst” of theatre....

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...