Directors: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate

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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.

But has this led to a theater of holiness? Considering the offspring of Marat / Sade—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.

Sedulous Brainwashing. Drama may reach for the stars, but it must be rooted in the soil of "the rough theater." This is the popular drama of crude jests, false noses, stuffed bellies and fear in a faceful of flour. It is vulgar, grotesque and obscene, and it ranges from Punch and Judy to Bertolt Brecht, who argued that the theater should be like a prize ring.

Quite apart from his self-proclaimed roughness, Brecht is a particular idol of Brook's because of his contention that an audience should wake up and think, and that drama should be an instrument of social change. Brook accepts too uncritically the notion that Brecht wanted an audience to think for itself: no playwright was a more sedulous brainwasher. Despite his fierce ideological bias, however, there is no convincing proof that Brecht—or any other playwright—ever altered the course of a society. Reflecting the nature of a society is another question; all good drama does that.

Not Asking to Be God. In his closing section on "the immediate theater," Brook deals mostly with his own work. Immediate theater is uniquely a director's medium. "It is a strange role, that of the director," writes Brook. "He does not ask to be God, and yet his role implies it. He wants to be fallible, and yet an instinctive conspiracy of the actors is to make him the arbiter, because an arbiter is so desperately wanted all the time. In a sense the director is always an impostor, a guide at night who does not know the territory, and yet he has no choice—he must guide, learning the route as he goes."

If the territory and the route are the play, they are not always dark and unknown. A great play is flooded by its author with inner light, and it is usually some jaded director who drags the drama off on some footless side path and leaves it mired and mangled. The text is not sacred Mosaic law, but it is more than a pretext for whimsical directorial pranks. Peter Brook is not that kind of man. He looks before he makes his exciting leaps. He wants a theater of passion and directs his plays to that end. At his best, he is flamboyantly faithful to his own finest dramatic aphorism: "A play is play."