Biography: Peter Brook celebrates his 80th birthday this month. This excellent book, by an expert in theatre, is part of that celebration. The journey, as they say in theatre, tells most of the story.
He was born in England of sophisticated Latvian Jewish parents and these genes are his own explanation for his restlessly complicated relationship to Englishness. "I feel myself at once very English and not English at all. All kinds of influences coming from different sources are able to pass through me and influence me," he has said.
By the age of 20 he was already at the centre of English theatre, about to embark on a series of extraordinary productions with its principal stars, Olivier, Gielgud, Ashcroft, Scofield and so on. Then, after a radically beautiful, "white-box" production in 1970 of A Midsummer Night's Dream he, essentially, turned away from English theatre altogether.
With forays into Asia and Africa, his work since then has been largely based in a dilapidated but majestic 19th-century theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, just behind the Gare du Nord, in Paris. This enterprise has been nothing less than a revolutionary assault on the whole structure and practice of theatre as we know it in the West.
Besides being a great director of plays and opera and a remarkable director of film, Brook is also a writer of considerable grace. His book, The Empty Space, is central to 20th-century theatre. He is also, perhaps, the best guide to his own work.
One of the merits of this book is that Kustow allows him to speak to us directly and often.
Kustow has also found Robert Facey in Toronto, a friend of Brook from schooldays with whom he has corresponded over the years. Facey has kept all these letters and they are worth printing in a volume. Take, for instance, the self- portrait that they offer of the teenage Brook. Cosmopolitan, literate in several languages and literatures, this 14- or 15- year-old has a self-confidence which must have depressed lesser mortals. The fierce concentration of those steely blue eyes is already in place, an intense focus which is directed equally on the physical as well as the intellectual world. This almost abnormal focus is the key to his theatricality.
The early Brook productions which had most effect upon me were Titus Andronicus (1955), with Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and the Wagnerian total theatre of Marat/Sade (1964).
Titus displayed the sawdust showmanship of Brook and, indeed, of Olivier himself. With a face like old leather and a voice out of some pit, Olivier contributed one of those heart-stopping falls from on high to within inches of the floor. Remember, as this book shows, this cultist guru-director also spent years working happily with Binkie Beaumont on popular plays in the West End. Anyway, what was most memorable about this production was the way Brook translated extreme physical violence into the emblematic, a signpost for much theatre and film in the second half of the century.
HE GOT HIS hands on the play Marat/Sade at exactly the right moment: after three or four months' intensive work with a group of actors trying to break the genteel mould of classic English theatre with the help of Artaud. There is a vivid account in the book by Glenda Jackson of what it was like working in this "Theatre of Cruelty" workshop.
Peter Weiss's script, with its mixture of madness and high rationality, its gross physicality and beautiful ritual, its invitation to the whole range of Brook's skills, was one of the major events in English- language theatre of the mid-century. It was also the production which pointed him towards Paris and the Bouffes du Nord.
I've only seen one production there, Qui est la? (1995), a mixed bag of bits of Hamlet, Gordon Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, Brecht and maybe others. There was something preposterous about it, a reminder, as this book fully illustrates, that within a prodigious output of work, some of the most exciting in contemporary theatre, Brook has frequently, and sometimes spectacularly, failed. But you watch his failures with a fascination and attention that you wouldn't give to some polished, finished piece up the street.
The first theatrical statement as you go into the Bouffes du Nord is the building itself, left in all its crumbling decay. You have this weird feeling that it is about to collapse in dust, tiered balconies and aged boxes tumbling down on top of you.
THIS IS IN keeping with what follows. Brook strips away all the chocolate comforts of conventional theatre in his pursuit of the essence of theatre itself. I've always thought of this as a political act, although his own emphasis is on the mysterious power of the human presence in space.
There is no denying the extraordinary images that he can cook up with minimal props, such as a single, but beautiful, oriental carpet. Or the resonance that he can exact from a mixture of texts. More than 50 years ago he shocked people by announcing: "The text can never be sacred." He went on: "A production that cuts, transposes and even re-writes a classical play, and in doing so brings the essence of that play closer to a modern audience, is performing a more legitimate service than the production which preserves the body of the play, but misses its soul."
Not everyone's cup of tea. There are people who point out that such risk-taking - Brook as auteur - leads to fuzziness of content on stage. Others say that, in his single-minded drive, he indulges mediocre acting. Certainly, the Senegalese Sotigui Kouyate and the Japanese Yoshi Oida are astonishing presences in his multicultural group but you couldn't say this of some of the others.
My understanding of all this is that Brook's target is not completeness at all but process, a vision of life and theatre as a search, a quest and a complete surrender to the intensity of the immediate moment. He is also not afraid to say "I don't know". Brook's vision is very much his own but Kustow offers many interesting details, including the influence of the Russian mystic, Gurdjieff.
There is padding towards the end of the book. Although he has directed John Arden and Caryl Churchill, Brook has generally avoided the work of contemporary British writers. This has irked some of the scribes. He is, however, a great admirer of Brian Friel, and his daughter Irina directed Dancing at Lughnasa in French. Now that's a production I would like to have seen.
Peter Brook: A Biography by Michael Kustow Bloomsbury, 334pp. £25
Thomas Kilroy's new play, Henry, with Stephen Rea in the lead, will open in August in the US