Review of Midsummers night dream- Peter Brook directer and star.

Historic Staging of Dream

Peter Brook Stresses Sensual Aspects

Stratford-on-Avon, England, August 27 1970.
Once in a while, once in a very rare while, a theatrical production arrives that is going to be talked about as long as there is a theater, a production that, for good or ill, is going to exert a major influence on the contemporary stage. Such a production is Peter Brook's staging of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which the Royal Shakespeare Company introduced here tonight.
It is a magnificent production, the most important work yet of the world's most imaginative and inventive director. If Peter Brook had done nothing else but this Dream he would have deserved a place in theater history.

Brook has approached the play with a radiant innocence. He has treated the script as if it had just been written and sent to him through the mail. He has staged it with no reference to the past, no reverence for tradition. He has stripped the play down, asked exactly what it is about. He has forgotten gossamer fairies, sequinned eyelids, gauzy veils and whole forests of Beerbolm-trees.
He sees the play for what it is - an allegory of sensual love, and a magic playground of lost innocence and hidden fears. Love in Shakespeare comes as suddenly as death, and when Shakespeare's people love they are all but consumed with sexual passion.
Brook's first concern is to enchant us - to reveal this magic playground. He has conceived the production as a box of theatrical miracles. It takes place in a pure-white setting. The stage is walled in on three sides, and the floor is also white. Ladders lead up the walls and on the top are scaffolds and rostrums from which actors can look down on the playing area like spectators at a bullfight.
The fairy characters - Oberon, Titania and Puck - are made into acrobats and jugglers. They swing in on trapezes, they amaze us with juggling tricks, Tarzan-like swings across the stage, all the sad deftness of clowns.
Shakespeare's quartet of mingled lovers, now mod kids humming love songs to loosely strummed guitars, are lost in the Athenian woods. The trees are vast metal coils thrown down from the walls on fishing rods, and moving in on unwary lovers like spiraling metallic tendrils. And in this wood of animal desire the noises are not the friendly warblings of fairyland, but the grunts and groans of some primeval jungle.

Sex and sexuality are vital in the play. Oberon and Titania, even when quareling, kiss with hasty, hungry passion - no shining moon for them - and the lovers seem to be journeying through some inner landscape of their own desires toward maturity.
The sexual relationship - with the wittiest use of phallic symbolism the stage can ever have seen - is stressed between Titania and Bottom. Yet the carnality of the piece is seen with affectionate tolerance rather than the bitterness the playwright shows in Troilus and Cressida, and this tolerance, even playfulness, suffuses the production.
Brook is a magician and he gives us new eyes. Here, for reasons admirably supported by the text, he has Theseus and Hippolyta (that previously rather dull royal couple whose wedding provides the framework for the play) played by the same actors as play Oberon and Titania. At once the play takes on a new and personal dimension. The fairies take on a new humanity, and these human princelings, once so uninteresting, are now endowed with a different mystery, and the gentle, almost sad note on which the play ends has a feeling of human comprehension and godlike compassion to it. It is most moving.
Two other characters take on dual assignments. Philostrate, that court master of ceremonies for Theseus, is also, naturally enough, Puck, and, rather more puzzlingly, Egeus, the angry father of Hermia, whose opposition to her marriage sets off the action, is also Peter Quince, one of the mechanicals. Presumably the purpose is to bring the play within the play more closely into the main sttructure, for just as Egeus initiates the real action, so Quince initiates the inner play. But it savors of a literary rather than dramatic device.

Puck is the key figure in this version. Looking like a more than usually perky Picasso clown, he bounces through the action with happy amiability, the model of toleration. John Kane plays him delightfully, performing his tricks with a true circus expertise and acting with unaffected delight.
The Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania of Alan Howard and Sara Kestelman are special pleasures, and the mechanicals with the terrible tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe are the best I have ever seen, with David Waller's virile Bottom particularly splendid.
But the star of this dream is Peter Brook himself, with his ideas, his theories and above all his practices. Of course he is helped - first by the samite-white pleasure palace devised by his Los Angeles-based designer, Sally Jacobs, and the richly evocative music and sound score provided by Richard Peaslee. But Mr. Brook is the genius architect of our most substantial pleasure.
He makes it all so fresh and so much fun. After a riotously funny and bawdy courtship of Titania by Bottom, the two leave the stage to, of all wonderful things, Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and all hell breaks loose, with confetti, paper streamers and Oberon himself flying in urbane mockery across the stage.

And Brook uses everything to hand - he is defiantly eclectic. It is as though he is challenging the world, by saying that there is no such thing as Shakespearean style. If it suits his purpose he will use a little kathakali, a pop song, sparklers borrowed from a toyshop, dramatic candles borrowed from Grotowski. It is all splendid grist to his splendid mill. Shakespeare can be fun, Shakespeare can be immediate, Shakespeare can most richly live.
Clive Barnes
New York Times, 28.8.70.

Theatre is a Whore.

"Theatre has often been called a Whore, meaning its art is impure, but today it is true in another sense- Whores take the money and then go short on the pleasure."
Brook is speaking of the section of acting that he refers to as 'The deadly theatre' He believes that actors and directors create dull, lifeless plays which do nothing to stimulate the audiences attention. He feels that onlookers to the perfromances will pretend to be interested and exillerated by the intense experience of Shakspeare et al, but will really be bored and more than a little confused. He names this is 'Deadly theatre' because he claims that it is what killed theatre. To name his profession to be 'Whore-like' is more than a little out of the ordinary, Brook feels that drama has become a dirty sport, stealing peoples money with the promise of 'a good time' and then boring them into sleeping states.

Brooks: KING LEAR.

A look at King lear, directed by brook.

Peter Brook: Life and Productions.

Born in 1925, Peter Brook grew up in London and studied at Oxford, where he first made his name as a director. Soon after graduating, he was talent-spotted by the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford and put on a celebrated version of Love's Labour's Lost in 1947. This image dates from that era.

 

Brook went on to direct many of the era's most exciting productions. This 1958 version of Titus Andronicus – stylised, evocative and almost painfully beautiful – starred Laurence Olivier and his then wife Vivien Leigh

 

Another celebrated Shakespeare staging, King Lear, appeared at Stratford in 1962 and was later made into a movie. It starred Paul Scofield as a rasping, granitic hero whose anger and bitterness drive him to self-destruction

 

Brook went on to rewrite the rules of British theatre, introducing the work of theorists such as Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski to English-speaking readers in his book The Empty Space (1968)

Brook put theory into practice in his 1963 production of Peter Weiss's violent, shocking play Marat/Sade, set in a lunatic asylum lorded over by the Marquis de Sade. In the film version Patrick Magee played the Marquis, with Ian Richardson as Marat

Despite his many UK productions, Brook has always been an internationalist. He set up the multilingual International Centre for Theatre Research with Micheline Rozan in 1970, basing it at a derelict Parisian music hall - the Bouffes du Nord

One of his most famous productions of this period was The Mahabharata (1985), a nine-hour retelling of the Hindu epic, which debuted in Avignon. It went on to tour the world, and was staged at the Bouffes du Nord two years later

Despite his commitment to alternative forms of theatre, Brook has often returned to Shakespeare. He is depicted here during rehearsals for a multi-ethnic production of The Tempest (1990)

Brook spoke to the Guardian in 2005. 'I don't like grand terms such as "artistic vision" because I don't believe I have one,' he said. 'For me, the absolute necessity was to work with actors of different cultures and backgrounds and play in front of different audiences'

 

Brook has emphasised that although from 2011 he will hand over the day-to-day running of the Bouffes du Nord to collaborators Olivier Mantei and Olivier Poubelle, this will not be the end. 'I never talked about retirement,' he told the Guardian