Conversations with Peter Brook: 1970-2000
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- €14.99
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- €14.99
Publisher Description
“A fascinating and provocatively stimulating distillation of three decades of intense conversations between one of the twentieth century’s few true theater innovators and America’s leading writer on the theatrical avant-garde. A splendid book.”—Clive Barnes
“Peter Brook continues to astonish, not in an ordinary, fashionable way, but in an ancient, insistent way that always forces one inward. There is a true, honest, fearless voice in this fascinating conversation.”—Ken Burns
Peter Brook, one of the most important contemporary theatrical directors in the West, shares his most insightful thoughts and deepest feelings about theater with Margaret Croyden, who has followed his career for thirty years, gaining an unparalleled perspective on the evolution of his work. In these interchanges from 1970 to 2000, Brook freely discusses major works such as his landmark airborne A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his untraditional interpretation of the opera La Tragédie de Carmen. He also covers the establishment of the Paris Center, his work in the Middle East and Africa, and his masterwork, the nine-hour production of The Mahabharata, which has virtually reinvented the way actors and directors think about theater.
Margaret Croyden is a well-known critic, commentator, and journalist, whose articles on theater and the arts have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Village Voice, American Theatre, and Antioch Review, among others. She is the author of Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, a seminal book on the development of nonliterary theater.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"No man reveals his depth, or his truth, without a challenge," the groundbreaking theater director Peter Brook told Croyden (In the Shadow of the Flame, etc.). Again and again in this fascinating collection of interviews with Brook about his extraordinary body of work from tiny performances in African villages to his masterpiece, a nine-hour production of the Hindu epic The Mahabharata Croyden shows how the craft of journalism can rise to the level of art itself by challenging an artist to reveal himself. The author, who has written about the theater for the New York Timesand other publications, draws out the aims and motivations that led Brook far beyond the commercial success that hit in 1971, with a beautiful, soaring production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (the actors took to the air on trapezes, walked on stilts, swung on ropes) that liberated Shakespeare from chains of convention and dazzled crowds. By the time the play opened on Broadway, Brook (along with Croyden) was on a mountainside in Iran, directing a play that featured a made-up language and an international cast. Not content to liberate just Shakespeare, Brook and his Paris-based International Center of Theater Research were out to explore how the deepest human truths can be expressed in the most direct way possible. "Never satisfied, striving to find a more refined aesthetic to express the mysteries of the human spirit, Brook is unfazed by challenges, hardships, or criticism that may arise...." Croyden tracks Brook through his spiritual and geographic travels, asking challenging questions and refusing to back down until the answer Brook gives has the ring of personal truth. The resulting work will illuminate and enthrall anyone who loves the theater and everyone interested in what it can mean to live fearlessly and creatively, to make one's life a search.
