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 because, as Brook implies, performance is constantly recreated. Film is a representation of the past. There are great and timeless films, but a popular film loses its “playability” in 10 years. Production designs for theatre have an even shorter life span according to Brook. Even beyond the design elements which might incorporate fashionable colors or costume details borrowed from popular culture, the character of a performance changes in the course of a run. Opening nights are filled with tension and newness, the edgy risks of the new production are highlighted because they have not been done before an audience yet. By second night, the audience is not as exposed because they know it has been done at least once.

In this chapter, more than in the others, Brook addresses Time and the theatre. In a cast of older and younger performers, you can see the differences in actor training techniques and the practices of different “generations”. Brook calls upon all the ranks in a company to aid in the art of reinvention and re-creating (of play-ing) during rehearsals. He speaks of the importance of improvisation, not to indulge in the self or for its own sake, but to step outside of the defined and preconceived and begin to create a creative language unique to the needs of the present work.

Brook also talks about the director in contemporary theatre and the need to guide and unify. A director must keep an eye on all elements of the performance from the shapes suggested by the floor plan to the context of the performance in the culture of its audience. He also speaks of a kind of balancing act, seeing the merits of both the physical and psychological approaches to performance and always outlines the need for adaptability while serving one vision. Discussion of this chapter is probably better served by comparing experiences in one’s performance and directing with those in the book.

Finally Brook outlines that the search is ultimately a search for form. As we progress forward, sideways and sometimes backward, the art of performance progresses as well. For this reason, there is never likely to be a “World Theatre” (p. 135) but there will be situations where a form will reach a moment of achievement that makes all distinctions and labels (Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate) redundant when compared to the lasting impression it leaves. We are always on the move. One of the hardest things for a young actor to do is to place value in the act of training. We are a society that validates Victorian ideals of forward progress. Reinvention seems counter-productive. Athletes understand the value of training, musicians and dancers do as well. But actors have a task of making their work seem effortless, effacing or masking the evidence of labour. The formula that Brook discusses (Theatre = R r a) is a great tool to examine exactly what we do. Theatre is Repetition, representation and assistance. Repetition gives technical perfection, confidence and strength, but it is hollow. The act of representation breathes life into the work, searching for the immediate, the real and comparing it to the fake. Assistance comes from the director, who is a privileged observer and guide, and also from the audience, who assists by participating: by making it meaningful and allowing the truth of the performance to become a truth of life, for two or so hours.

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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 because the audience recognizes its necessity and purpose. One of the responsibilities of the theatre is to meet this expectation of necessity (the “usefulness” of performance). Whether it is to provide an hour of escape during wartime or to awaken the spirit of revolution, the rough theatre uses what is at hand to fulfill its purpose.

Brook points out that there is a kind of antagonism between the rough and the holy; the rough is self-consciously less high-aiming than the holy. But Brook also reminds us that while the Rough Theatre makes an effort to exist outside of style it, in fact creates its own (while denying that it has – a knd of reverse snobbery).

In discussing the slippery slope between the rough and the deadly, Brook looks to Brecht; a subject anyone interested in performance cannot overlook. But the “Brechtian” elements of contemporary theatre can often become victims of their own inflated sense of self-importance. Brook criticizes misreadings and half-baked imitations of Brecht’s work in this chapter. I am of the opinion that today’s audiences are more skeptical, more intellectually engaged and already more alienated than Brecht’s original audience. Perhaps this is why Brecht said what he did near the end of his days; that the theatre should have naivety as well.

The chapter ambles from history and anthropology to politics and the actor’s studio work. He draws the reader to Shakespeare as an example of a theatre where the rough and the holy coexist and seem to energize each other with their contrasting qualities. He is a advocate of connecting the work on stage to its surroundings by using costume, setting (or no setting) to give the action of the play meaning and to assist in the fluid interchange between the outer and inner worlds that Shakespearean structure navigates so freely.

I would like to highlight one section that really stood out for me this time around. It is quite short; pages 77 to 79 where Brook addresses the over-simplification of the terms “psychological” and “naturalistic” in current aactor training. It interests me because the first hurdle one addresses in actor training revolves around the distinction between playing emotion and playing action. There comes a point where one leads the other and they seem (to the outside eye) one and the same.

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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, Jerzy Grotowski and The Living Theatre of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. In these four sections convey what one could take to be the main values of a Holy Theatre.

1) The importance of a tradition, or knowledge of one’s place in the evolution of one’s discipline.

2) The invisible can never really be perceived by pointing directly at it. It must be evoked through symbolism that has clarity. By clarity, I think he means a truth that is not vague but has immediate resonance without necessarily being immediately readable (This = That).

3) He makes an excellent point of showing how one’s art has to be validated by providing its practitioners a living. There are implied questions here to the reader; “What would you consider a living?” “How would you arrange your life so that you could serve your art and have it serve you back?” “Where does your work and your community lie? Is it in a friendly environment where there is a unity of values and tension shared by the work and its audience, or is it in hostile territory where its value might be to divide and provoke its audience?”

4) The Holy Theatre often contains its opposite. With moments of apotheosis come moments of derision. We cannot see all of the invisible at once and must be knocked back down to earth. It seems to be an essential aspect of the human condition, which a Holy Theatre could not deny without becoming deadly.

This chapter makes brief mention of Tradition and its role in the theatre, and references several areas of inquiry that were coming into the fore at the time of writing. He calls it a “rich and dangerous eclecticism” (p. 63). Superficiality is, as he has pointed out, the road to deadliness. But, ironically, so is tradition. This seems to have become the backbone of the work conducted at Paris’ International Centre for Theatre Research. Here is an essay on the topic, “Peter Brook and Traditional Thought” by Basarab Nicolescu Translated by David Williams. Basarab Nicolescu is a quantum physicist from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Paris 6.
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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. This chapter leaves you with the feeling that not much has changed in commercial and mainstream theatre practice since 1968 when Brook wrote it. What was deadly then is just as deadly today.

The term “Deadly Theatre” does not refer to a specific genre of work or a particular type of theatre (e.g. commercial, community, political or musical comedy); it refers to a practice. The deadly can be found in a “sure ticket” opera or an over-toured hit, but can also be found in a moment of a performance or in a week of rehearsals or in the habitual practices of an actor. As he makes his way through his topic, Brook makes some penetrating observations, lining up all the “usual suspects”. Performer, director, playwright, critic and even the audience member all bear responsibility for creating the deadly.

In his opening paragraphs Brook reminds us of the boring and pompous theatre we mistake for “culture”, which we swallow like bitter medicine because we’ve been bullied into thinking it is good for us. Television has trained us to be disengaged critics, judging things based on our personal likes and dislikes rather than their purpose and merit. Our preoccupation with art that imitates life has skewed our perception of excellence. We often praise skilled imitation instead of truth. It is in this observation that Brook makes a strong platform for his views on process. He points out that in order to make good theatre the rehearsal process must re-enter a creative process and re-discover the text as it applies to the living components of performance. It should have roots in the time, place, country, beliefs and tensions of the people creating and attending it.

Brook makes his best points in his conclusion where he says he is not against fun or frivolity. He is against superficiality when it is being practiced without knowing it. This chapter also begins his process of stripping the stage back to “The Empty Space” by asking how to connect the stage to its community. He discusses his various experiences in touring a show to audiences of different geographical, political and economic backgrounds and how these factors influenced the work.

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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.

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