Word: brookes
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...theater, Peter Brook is more of a general than a visionary. A brainy and restless director, he rules his actors like a task-force commander, dispatching them on missions of dramatic exploration-most notably in his production of Marat / Sade. In a new book, The Empty Space, Brook displays himself as a man in the ironic position of being grafted to the theater while finding most of it lifeless. Based on a series of four lectures that he delivered to English university students, the book is divided into four sections: "The Deadly Theater," "The Holy Theater," "The Rough Theater...
Nice and Decent. "The Deadly Theater" is an all too common experience. One has only to sniff the garbage that piles up on Broadway and London's West End every season. But Brook is interested in subtler forms of deadliness, an anemia that saps Shakespeare as well as silly plays. He feels that each drama must be reborn rather than merely remembered and repeated, and that rebirth is fully as difficult as birth. A play dies when too vast a gap develops between it and the life around it. The exquisite mandarinisms of the centuries old Peking Opera...
Plague and Magic. How can a vivid experience be created? Brook calls for a "holy theater," and then searches rather desperately for a definition. At one point, he says almost longingly that "we have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony-whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals-but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow." Brook's deepest illumination about a holy theater comes from the French actor and critic Antonin Artaud, who conceived of the theater of cruelty as searingly holy, "working like the plague, by intoxication, by infection...
Peter Weiss' play Marat/ Sade was explicitly based on a cryptic plot suggestion by Artaud. As directed by Brook, it proved to be one of the most fecund works in the contemporary theater. The naked backside of Marat has turned the stage into a kind of auxiliary nudist camp. The tormented, writhing chorus of the inmates at Charenton popularized choreographic stage movement in straight plays, and the eerie sounds and gestures have become the language of antiword drama...
...Hair, Futz!, Tom Paine, Dionysus in '69-one scarcely thinks of holiness but of a kind of Corybantic Holy Rollerism. There is no deep ritualistic satisfaction in hearing the Dionysus in '69 troupe sibilantly repeat, "May I take you to your seat, sir?" in a seatless theater. Brook, of course, should not be blamed for his disciples. He himself expresses uneasy doubts as to whether the theater can restore rit ual or serve as displaced religion...