Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
I first got to know Peter Brook in the late 1940s, seeing two of his Shakespearean productions at Stratford- upon-Avon: Love's Labour Lost, and Romeo and Juliet. Immediately I could tell that he had his own, new approach to Shakespeare.
I remember discussing Shakespeare with him in person at one of the receptions given by the English PEN centre. I had graduated a few years before and I was filled with enthusiasm for the Bard. So impressed was I by what he said that I jotted it all down as soon as I was home; I still keep those notes.
Brook believed that since Shakespeare's day the style of presentation of his plays had developed in tandem with social transformations, the Shakespearean tradition acting as a mirror of all the changes in the tastes of English society. Garrick's renditions of the 18th century differ from Kenu and Macready's, and definitely from those of Gilgiud and Olivier.
Brook emphasised the fact that in theatre, more than any other art, one must be constantly aware of the audience. The director must work to communicate to a specific mass of people, and "their immediate reaction is his only measure of success." The director works "with three elements: his text, his audience and his medium." Of these, only the first is constant. The director's principal duty is to discover the author's every intention, transmitting it through every possible means.
One of the greatest errors a theatre director can make is to believe that a script will speak for itself. No play can speak for itself. The trouble with seeing Shakespeare in England is that too large a proportion of intelligent playgoers know their Shakespeare too well. Like specialists, they listen to the familiar lines, coolly assessing the actors' treatment of them.
Brook criticises the simplistic approach of directors who attempt to recreate the conditions of Shakespeare's day, staging his plays on a make-believe Elizabethan stage. He points out that it is impossible to re-create the full flavour of Elizabethan theatre, with its crowds, its noises, its smells.
Shakespeare is the world's most popular dramatist. His plays have been more frequently performed, translated and read than those of any other writer. Yet in his own country he has become one of the least performed dramatists. In Brook's opinion what this implies is a faulty method of presentation. To communicate any one of Shakespeare's plays to a present-day audience, Brook believes, the director must be prepared to set every resource of modern theatre at the disposal of his text.
Brook feels that is through approaching and producing Shakespeare as a contemporary playwright that one comes close to the original sense and tone of these works, whose power resides not in Elizabethan associations but in universal human qualities that can be endlessly reinterpreted.
Brook now lives in Paris, where in 1974 he created an international centre for drama. He is currently preparing for a Paris production of Hamlet, in English, after which he is to stage a French version in London. Brook's company has artists from some African and Asian countries. In the 1970s, as the chairman of the State Information Service, I invited him to Cairo, where he met with several artists and theatre producers with the aim of inculcating Egyptian drama into his repertoire. For one reason or another, the project never took off.
These days Brook is being celebrated as "a prince in exile." The Indepent Review recently carried an interview with him in which he explains that he left England because he found in France conditions conducive to deep, long-term theatrical research and a culture that appreciates the gifted individual as well as the institution. Yet, in spite of his 50-year-long expatriation he is regarded, in the words of Paul Taylor, as "the iconic father figure of artists who have chosen to go abroad to find the right kind of creature environment and level of subsidy."
