The Rough Theatre

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

Chapter 3, The Rough Theatre.

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] Rough Theatre is the theatre of tattered 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 and that 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 rouse the spirit of revolution, the rough theatre uses whatever is at hand to fulfill its purpose in a practical manner.

Brook points out that there is a kind of antagonism between the rough and the holy; one is decidedly less high-falootin’ than the other. But he 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). A movement in popular music comes to mind. Many are aware of the “alternative” music scenes which cropped up in the last decade or so. This genre-word sprang up to confront the overproduced sound of studio and techno bands, but after a while it formulated itself. The word “alternative” which, in its purest sense should refer to a vastness of possibilities, comes to mean a quite strictly defined look and sound. It has become quite easy to identify the “alternative” in the marketplace by the culture of imitation that it has propogated (the deadly).

In discussing the 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 be seen as a victim of their own importance. Brook criticizes misreadings and half-digested imitations of Brecht’s work in this chapter. He does make a good point when he suggests that one should consider the context of Brecht’s work. I am of the opinion that today’s audiences are more skeptical, more intellectually engaged and already more alienated than Brecht’s original audience. Popular media culture and post-modern practices such as the displacement of symbols and the fracturing of narrative have conditioned us to be judgmental and subject illusion to scrutiny (maybe even creating an illusion of scrutiny: scrutiny as entertainment?). Perhaps this is why Brecht said what he did near the end of his days; that the theatre should have naivety as well.

As he does, Brook ambles quite comfortably from one topic to another in this chapter; from history to anthropology to politics to an 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 by 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 simplification of the terms “psychological” and “naturalistic”. It interests me because the first hurdle one addresses in actor training revolves around the distinction between playing emotion and playing action. In good practice you want to discourage emotion and encourage action. But there comes a point where one leads the other and they seem (to the outside eye) one and the same. It is touched on in this section. I know that many of the actors studying in the studio have, at times, been exasperated by this, but I honestly think of this as the first lesson of the actor in training.

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