Threads of Time by Peter Brook Methuen 241pp, £17.99 in UK
Peter Brook was born in London in 1925, the second son of Latvian emigr es. At twenty-one he directed major postwar productions of Shakespeare at Stratford on Avon, opera at Covent Garden, and new plays in London's West End. In 1964 his version of the Marat/Sade for the RSC initiated a theatrical revolution, as well as Brook's subsequent restless exploration of non-Western theatre.
In Threads of Time he invites us into his private memories, and the unfolding of his own inner search. He invites us to travel back with him through his development from the self-absorbed schoolboy who was shy of groups and at odds with the British schooling system, to his present position at the head of the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris.
The scientist parents of this enfant terrible left for Belgium after his revolutionary-minded father was asked to quit Latvia. In Dover a baffled passport officer wrote down the family name "Brouck" as "Brook". Stoically, the parents accepted the name, and went on to set up a pharmaceutical business and provide their two boys with a very comfortable childhood, despite the vicissitudes of wartime.
To his father's dismay, Peter's first love was not law, but the cinema. Ten years later, when offered a shot at direction by Merton Park Studios in South London, this "young man in a hurry" who believed he would only live to be forty and that "it was now or never", turned it down. Instead, he started the Film Society at Oxford University, procured discarded film stock from fighter planes during the war, had it processed by a pornographic film-maker, and was expelled for it.
Brook had the British glamour circuit at his feet well before he reached the forecasted fatal forty. He knew colossi such as Gielgud, Scofield, Olivier, and Vivienne Leigh. Interestingly, as well as directing opera (he was booed off the stage for Dali's designs for one of his productions), he was appointed ballet critic for the Ob- server. He even shot a Rinso commercial.
His inquiring mind, which sought out the (self-acclaimed) "wickedest man in all the world", Aleister Crowley, to be "magical adviser" on his first production Marlow's Doctor Faustus (1944), was later to bring him on a personal esoteric inner search which led to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. This in turn led to the film version of Meetings with Remarkable Men, made in Afghanistan. No wonder people cry "guru"
When he was forty-five, Brook's first administrative task was to raise $3 million to fund a claptrap tour through Africa for a bunch of actors in jeeps. Who else could do it? The Anderson Foundation came on board thanks to a flukey fog over Aspen (fluke is another phenomenon he believes in), as well as the Ford and Gulbenkian Foundations.
In Brook's work, the theatrically rigid "two room" aesthetic gave way to the concept of theatre as a "one room" event, drawing the spectator and actor closer to inhabit the same space. Helen Mirren, who "decided to accept the ultimate challenge of starting from nothing", was a player in these 1972 African village "carpet shows".
More an adherent of quantum mechanics than any political system (an early meeting with Brecht left a strong distaste for anything didactic), Brook says: "Good theatre . . . must show that political absolutes are painfully relative and many commitments dangerously naive."
An inventory of Brook's universe would be eccentric and eclectic indeed: Yorubas, Tuaregs, Shankaracharya, Ted Hughes, Jean Genet, Salvador Dali at the breakfast table with two flowers in his nostrils.
For Brook, the function of theatre is still what it was in ancient times, "to heal the city", and an auditorium is like "a small restaurant whose responsibility is to nourish its customers". But this is no theatrical casebook. In it Brook celebrates life and its uncertainties, and dares to use the "Dh" word: "The cosmos has its Dharma, and each individual has his or her own dharma; our obligation is to discover this, understand it, and make its realisation our constant aim." In the story of his life Peter Brook intertwines two threads: inner explorations and theatre experiments. They dovetail throughout and make a pattern which is unique to this extraordinary and exemplary man.
Deirdre Mulrooney is a free- lance writer and lectures at UCD's Drama Studies Centre