Directors: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate

• Share

As a man of the 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" and "The Immediate Theater." Conversational in tone, it has an uneven texture that ranges from exact perceptions to fuzzy evangelism. Yet theatergoers who care about the nature and destination of contemporary drama will be drawn to The Empty Space with ravenous interest.

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, for example, cannot sustain themselves in a world of Red Guards.

There is also a deadly spectator who helps kill drama. He is the theatergoer whose only conception of good theater is that it be nice, decent, reassuring and uplifting, but never marrow-chilling or soul-devouring. Playwrights themselves propagate dead plays, since most of them cannot fulfill the single most demanding requisite of vital drama: "A playwright is required by the very nature of drama to enter into the spirit of opposing characters. He is not a judge; he is a creator. The job of shifting oneself totally from one character to another—a principle on which all of Shakespeare and all of Chekhov is built —is a superhuman task at any time." What makes the playwright's task more difficult today is the death of certain theatrical conventions: "The lukewarm virtues of good craftsmanship, sound construction, effective curtains, crisp dialogue have all been thoroughly debunked."

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, by analogy, by magic; a theater in which the play, the event itself, stands in place of a text."