HE IS perhaps the most influential stage director alive, the man who broke every rule in theatre, stripped performance spaces bare and let the audience's imagination do the work. At 83, Peter Brook flinches at the word retirement.
But after more than 30 years at the helm of his revolutionary Paris theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, the British director has announced he is gradually to hand over the day-to-day running of his experimental space to a new generation of directors.
With a career ranging from Shakespeare to his acclaimed film of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, from staging the Indian epic poem The Mahabharata to works by that other famous self-exile in Paris, Samuel Beckett, Brook is adamant he will keep working until the end of his life. But in the first sign of a changing of the guard, he has indicated he is now managing a transition to a new generation.
He said: "I wanted to look very realistically to the future. I can't say I'll stay here for ever. Everyone says something has been created almost invisibly in this theatre over 34 years.
"A lot of thought went into what would be the proper continuity. I didn't want to just place someone here and say, 'Here, take over'. I never talked about retirement as retirement is something forced on you by the state if you are unfortunate enough to work for the state. This has always been a private theatre."
Brook will slowly hand the reins over to Olivier Mantei, deputy head of the Paris opera company Opéra-Comique and currently head of musical programming at the Bouffes du Nord. Olivier Poubelle, a theatre entrepreneur specialising in modern music at some of Paris's most cutting-edge popular music venues, will work alongside him.
When Brook seized on the Bouffes du Nord in 1974, it was a dilapidated former music hall and variety theatre on a grim crossroads behind the Gare du Nord. Desperate to break with the conventional stage spaces of places like London's West End, Brook and his experimental group styled this Parisian "ruin" as the ideal theatre, a decaying and deliberately intimate performance space that France now prizes as one of its most important cultural gems. Brook said the transition would take place over the next two to three years; he will still direct his own shows, including a forthcoming adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute.
Asked what he had learned after more than 34 years at the theatre, he said: "Never ask yourself what you have learned . . . only ask yourself what are the circumstances which are different from last year. In that way, you can apply last year's lessons. Experience means that the ground is prepared. As in Hamlet's last lines, 'The readiness is all'." - (Guardian service)