Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

---

It is often said that renowned director Peter Brook "uses drama to examine the human condition". Many critics recognise him as the greatest theatre director to have emerged since WWII.

The theatre world will be celebrating Brook's 80th birthday in March 2005, and yet, like the early preparations for Christmas, the English press is full of articles about him.

I had the pleasure of watching his production of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet. They were productions which could be described as revolutionary. I remember listening to him in London talking about style in Shakespearean production. The talk was later published in the first issue of Orpheus a publication edited by John Lehmann who had previously founded the wartime magazine New Writing.

Brook was of the opinion that in the centuries since Shakespeare's day, the style of presentation of his plays had closely followed social changes. It was those changes which differentiated between well-known directors: Garrick, Kean, Macready and Irving. Production style, he went on to say, "was moulded by social history".

I cannot in this short article summarise Brook's thought. One point in particular attracted my attention: the producer of a Shakespearean play, says Brook, is working with three elements: his text, his audience and his medium, and of these only the first is constant. It is the producer's primary duty to discover every intention of the author and to transmit these with every possible means at his disposal.

Brook is of the opinion that there is no perfect production of any play, nor is there any final one; like a musician's interpretation, its existence is inseparable from its performance. A production, he goes on to say "is only right at a given moment, and anything that it asserts dogmatically today may well be wrong 50 years from now".

Brook took his opinion further in his production of Romeo and Juliet at Stratford in 1947, which I had the pleasure of watching. In it he tried, and indeed succeeded, to find a modern stage which "could give freedom and space to the sweep of the poem". He discarded the traditional idea that Romeo and Juliet is a sentimental story to be played against a series of backdrops giving picture- postcard views of Italy. In his opinion it is a play of youth, of freshness, of open air, in which the sky -- the great tent of Mediterranean blue -- hangs over every moment of it.

There was no traditional scenery or decoration. His backdrop suggested wide spaces, and the play's atmosphere is described in a single line in the play "these hot days is the mad blood stirring". Its treatment, Brook goes on to say "must be to capture the violent passion of two children lost amongst the southern fury of the warring houses". His production -- which at the time created quite a storm of criticism -- had no place for sweetness and sentimentality in the characterisation, the speaking, the setting or the music.

In the late 1970s when I was chairman of the State Information Service I invited Brook to Egypt and introduced him to a number of our theatre directors. At that time he was living in Paris where in 1974 he created the Boofes du Nord, a multinational theatre company. If I remember correctly he invited Hassan El-Greitly, creator of the Warsha Company to Paris to create the troupe. Brook travelled through a number of countries with the aim of seeing what could be learnt about theatre by throwing away all the customary props of shared references and by performing stories outdoors.

According to Paul Taylor in an article titled "The Grand Inquisitor" Brook's journey has been a constant search for deeper ways of discovering "what is the essence of theatre" and "what can theatre uniquely do". In answer to this Brook writes: "Theatre can catch glimpses of what our lives have lost and give us a fleeting taste of qualities long forgotten."