Adrian Lester: “Peter saw theater as a relentless investigation”
I’ve never seen a director discard so many brilliant ideas because they didn’t quite fit what he wanted the audience to hear. Peter was always reducing things to their simplest and most honest way. He spoke softly, very kindly, incredibly cunning. His powers of observation were the best I have ever known.
Some directors will tell you what to do: sit here, walk there, sit. This is the most basic type of approach, such as directing traffic. The others will tell you how to say what you are saying. But Peter directed your thoughts. He didn’t care as much about how it sounded or how you moved, he cared what you meant. You were always digging into deeper parts of yourself. When you did a play with him, you really didn’t know where his work ended and where your work began. It felt like you were completely free on stage.
The first time we worked together at Hamlet, it was just him and me in a rehearsal room for a week. We went over Hamlet’s soliloquies chronologically and he sat very close to me, both on the floor, even the tension of standing up was removed. We separated the speeches and it became clear to me that “to be or not to be” was in the wrong place. This was the speech of a person trapped in a situation that twisted his mind and soul so much that he wondered if it would be worth living. Peter moved it to the point that Hamlet killed Poloni and removed the body and, in our version, then met Ophelia on stage and she occupies the widest place around her. You see Hamlet understands what he has done. It also gives you a step for the next time you see Ophelia when she is distressed and handing out flowers: she knows that the person she loves has killed her father.
Peter wanted to undress what he thought was unnecessary: he took out the political drama of Hamlet and wanted to concentrate on the domestic: mother, brother, father, son, uncle, friend. He called it The Tragedy of Hamlet. It happened live, at two and a half hours without a break, so it was also a test for the audience.
“I was always reducing things” … Adrian Lester in Hamlet’s essays at the Bouffes du Nord, 2000. Photo: Jean-Pierre Muller / EPA
Sometimes Peter would dismiss an idea, saying “This is opera” or “This is movie.” He always sought what was deeply theatrical and introduced into Western theater elements of acting older than ours, such as those in Africa and Japan.
Always very loyal, he had a group of actors to whom he returned over and over again because they had certain qualities that he wanted to use. We were surprised that in our portrayal of Hamlet, actor Yoshi Oïda came in during the rehearsals and acted with us for a while, and that Akram Khan also came in. Having a new person who was brilliant in his field and who would only make a moment on stage for us, changed the whole play and made it fresh.
The Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris [a dilapidated music hall reopened by Brook in 1974] it is a beautiful space. You can see a similar “rough magic” introduced today in new theaters. In older buildings, designers will raise their seats, push the stage and let the audience really look at the actors, all to increase the effect that you’re all together in the same space.
For Peter, theater was a non-stop investigation. Even in the final performance of Hamlet, and in the movie, we were still looking. An audience can hear when a comic has confidence, and then they will laugh. But if at some point they feel like the comic is worried or not really in shape, they won’t laugh. It is a sixth sense. In theater, and especially with Hamlet, these lines, rhythms, and questions need to be re-investigated each time. Sometimes you can come up with a slightly different answer than you did the night before. If you do it right, the audience will hear it and know that you’re not just going through a script.
If your end as an actor is that you want as many people as possible to look at you, fine, do yours. But we have a bigger role – every musician, dancer, singer and actor – and that is to keep a mirror in society. Peter said at one point, if Hamlet were a good work, we still wouldn’t do it 400 years later. Its longevity is a testament to the perfect questions it seems to ask about our darkest nature. It is not supposed to be well wrapped; it’s supposed to make you feel uncomfortable. It is this understanding of Hamlet that led me years later to understand why I went on stage and played Othello.
Peter understood that a play has its maximum power in the minds of the audience, and that what the actor does is use words to point out a meaning. This meaning is not a conclusion that they have already reached and that they deliver themselves. Peter has always dealt with the ethereal, with works that raise big questions about who we are and who we think we are. Not works that go to the beginning, middle and end, but works that leave you thinking about your own life during the journey home. CW
Without words … Vivien Leigh as Lavinia in Titus Andronicus in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955. Photo: AP
Janet Suzman: “He made the meat myth forever”
“Shiny Ice Pills.” Rely on Kenneth Tynan to find the perfect phrase to describe Peter Brook’s blue eyes, seekers, and seekers. His research is now over, after 97 years, leaving such a great legacy that I can only choose here to remember some stunning images.
Titus Andronicus in Stratford in the late 1950s … a figure slowly appears to his left, with his two nailed wrists painfully stretched out, showing a shocking cascade of scarlet ribbons falling from them, not a hair out of place in his exquisite head, not a tear. her beautiful dress, just a thread of blood from her perfect mouth, opened with a silent cry. The house bang I can still hear now when Vivien Leigh’s Lavinia was revealed, raped and mutilated and left speechless but without blood samples or tears or the disaster of realism.
Another indelible memory: Paul Scofield’s devastated face as Lear in the foreground in black and white, the closest I’ve ever seen, to Brook’s haunting film. Scofield was that rarest star that gave the impression of infinite inner landscapes behind his dark eyes; Lear without those hinterlands is an annoyingly whimsical and irascible old party. Lear’s Brook film is a dark poem of misunderstanding and enlightenment and is genius.
A third image: it is the year 1971 and under a blue-black Persian sky with diamond stars sits the lucky and lucky audience that could see the performance of Brook’s Orghast in Persepolis. Fifty meters above us a huge ball of fire, burning like the sun, slowly descends, its orange flames flickering over the ancient bas-reliefs adorning the tomb of Darius. Beneath this burning sphere, a corpulent man looks up in wonder, holding up a huge shiny brass plate on which the orb will delicately settle: the myth of Prometheus being lit. it becomes meat.
I thank you for these unforgettable ones, these and many more, and for the best and briefest note any director gave to an actor, when he was rehearsing Cleopatra’s costume. No matter what it was, but I’m forever grateful for the vision behind those naughty ice peaks.
“Infinitely More Intense” … Glenda Jackson as Cleopatra at Stratford CSR in 1978. Photo: Donald Cooper / Alamy
Glenda Jackson: “He always asked for the truth”
He was the greatest director the world has ever seen! Here was this guy who was constantly looking for something essentially true and deliverable to an audience. Nothing was taken for granted and he never took it for granted either: if he made us all go in the wrong direction, he would stop it and take us back to another path. Wherever I went, I was always open to cultures different from ours. His work was extraordinary and inspiring because he learned from those cultures.
Antoni and Cleopatra [starring Jackson and Alan Howard at the RSC in 1978] he made the shadow areas of the work much clearer. Before there must have been a majestic quality because she was queen of Egypt, but that was not her approach at all. It was infinitely more intense. He saw the other characters as people who lived and worked together 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, people who knew each other inside. This gave it a different dimension.
I visited him several times at the Bouffes du Nord. There was always the feeling that you would see an audience being taken to a different place. There’s a ruin, but whatever happens on stage, you’re in that world, not in a shabby theater.
He changed the theater by always demanding the truth, never using those words. He didn’t stay: if you went the wrong way, they told you without a doubt. He always felt like there was something to discover, and he was an absolute genius to help you find it. CW
Use your imagination … Frances de la Tour as Helena, with Ben Kingsley as Demetrius, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970. Photo: Donald Cooper / Alamy
Frances de la Tour: ‘Whatever you do, don’t act!’
Empty Space is a slender book but it says it all: someone goes on stage, someone watches, and this is the beginning of theater. And whatever you do, “Don’t act,” Peter would say. Lots to ask. It is the essential question: can you do this without acting? Just use your imagination.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a very physical production in a way no one had seen before. And not just the trapeze work. We were on stage, with Shakespeare’s lines always primary. You can’t jump on someone and not go out with the cobla either – that was the purpose of the jump, to do this amazing physical work and talk Shakespeare at the same time. In the rehearsal we sit in a circle …