For Peter Brook, the Experimental Showman, 'Nothing Is Ever Finished'

He drops his voice on the long “i,” letting it trail off into an endless, whispery ellipsis. His eyes narrow into slices of pale blue contemplation, bringing to mind a squinting siamese cat.

He is not asking a question. He is not expecting an answer.

“Why?” is the title of the new play written and directed by Brook and his longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, which begins performances Saturday at Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn, New York. (The production, which is also part of the 2019 Crossing the Line Festival, will be the centerpiece of a citywide series of forums, workshops and screenings celebrating Brook and Estienne.)

Why is also the animating principle of one of the longest, most consistently innovative careers in the international theater — one that embraces such landmark productions as the nine-hour epic “The Mahabharata” (from the mid-1980s) and an acrobatic “Midsummer Night’s Dream” from 1970 that forever redefined both presentation and perceptions of Shakespeare.

Being a man of many languages, Brook considered other names for his latest piece, a meditation on the life of experimental Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold and on the raison d’être of theater itself. The French, Italian, German and Russian equivalents of “why” were all assessed and discarded, mostly for phonetic reasons. The very sound of the English word “why,” he says “has the magic of an open question, which means there is no possible way of answering it.”

There’s another “w” word for which he has great affection: “Wow.” That’s what happens when a single moment onstage seems to open into timelessness.

Brook has been doing his best to wow audiences around the world since he rose to fame in his early 20s as the wunderkind of London’s West End. It is hard to think of another theater director whose body of work has been so singular in its multiplicity.

This, after all, is a man who has been both the darling of urbane, postwar London audiences with his ingeniously elaborate productions (“Nobody could accuse Peter Brook of simplicity,” Kenneth Tynan wrote in 1953) and a roving play maker whose improvisational troupe performed in African villages with only a carpet for a stage.

His collaborators have ranged from the expected constellation of stars (Olivier, Gielgud, Mirren) to artist Salvador Dalí, poet Ted Hughes and neurologist Oliver Sacks.

That’s not to mention the Sanskrit scholars, Hindu priests and temple storytellers in India whom Brook consulted for the creation of “The Mahabharata.” Or the time he traveled to Haiti with Graham Greene and Truman Capote, with whom he subsequently visited Cuba, where they all went to the movies with Fidel Castro.

Brook connects such disparate elements in conversation, linking them all to his favorite monosyllable. I had to learn, though, not to derail his chapterlike monologues, which paradoxically loop and swirl through vast swaths of time and space with the linear determination of a locomotive.

He is not someone, he tells me early on, who can give me a “simple answer” to even mundane questions. “You see, I can’t tell you anything,” he says, “without looking back on everything.”

A Utilitarian Dandy

When I meet Brook in August, he is lodged for the summer in temporary quarters, away from his usual home near the Paris Opera. The door is opened by Etienne, 75 — a wry, sinewy woman with a gamin haircut. She has been working with Brook for more than 40 years and is someone with whom he says he has come to communicate wordlessly.

“We discovered on our very first meeting that we shared the same birthday, which was a wonderful discovery,” Brook says of Estienne, who was a journalist and theater critic when they met in 1969. “Out of that, a relationship developed and developed.” Their recent collaborations memorably include the elegiac, four-character “Battlefield,” an exquisite four-character coda to “The Mahabharata,” seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2016.

They are continuing to tinker with the script for “Why?,” which made its debut in June at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, a decrepit 19th-century show palace that Brook had reclaimed in the early 1970s for his International Center for Theater Research. (He stepped down as its head a decade ago, but it continues to serve as his base of operations.)

“As you know,” he says of their continuing revisions, “nothing is ever finished.”

He is wearing a white shirt, black cargo pants and a blue scarf, a utilitarian dandy. Chairs have been arranged in the open dining-living area so that we are practically knee to knee. He has irreversible macular degeneration, he tells me, so he can’t make out faces very well.

“What is really interesting is to see how the brain enables one to establish tactics,” he says. And I remember that he has created at least two theater pieces about the neurological mysteries of the human mind, including a deeply affecting work inspired by Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”

He can deduce names on the caller ID readout on his phone, for example, through the divisions of the clusters of letters. “It’s the same with looking at the stage,” he says. “Knowing what I’m looking for, I can see.”

A longtime disciple of the teachings of Russian-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff — and perhaps the world’s foremost advocate of theater at its most elemental and universal, in books that include the biblical “The Empty Space” — Brook in his 90s, emanates a jaunty, slightly sibylline air of authority. His large, mottled white head — balanced on his compact body — suggests a recently restored bust of a Roman statesman, startlingly enlivened by those blue, blue, interrogative eyes.

He walks carefully but propulsively, which is the way he talks, too. And he retains the seductive arts of the consummate showman, as befits a man who has talked so many people into helping him make unlikely visions of what theater could and should be into realities.

Though he does not encourage interruptions when he speaks, he is always aware of me, his audience, and how I am responding. As he speaks of questioning — and questing — as the motor that has driven his life, he couches our interview in a cosmic context: “How is it that on this planet, here, in a little corner of it, there are two little atoms of creation, sitting and talking to one another?” He taps me on the knee.

The French windows onto the balcony have been left open. But since it is August in Paris, in a quiet neighborhood, there are none of the usual, urgent noises of urban street life, and when I look out the window from where I’m sitting, all I can see is sky.

“You know,” Brook says, “since I’ve been living here I have this uncanny feeling, although what I normally think of as Paris is just a 15-minute drive from here, that I’m in another country.”

‘Never Reach a Conclusion’

In a way, another country is always where Brook has aspired to be.

The London-born son of Russian-Jewish scientists from Latvia (his father patented a popular medicine called Brooklax), the young Peter dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent, “to have the joy of being sent all over the world, month after month, to dangerous struggle spots anywhere — just to say this world is not the little world of middle-class London.”

As a student at Oxford University, he also thought he might become a painter, a composer, a pianist and, most particularly, a filmmaker. (He did indeed go on to make movies that include “Lord of the Flies” and “Meetings with Remarkable Men,” adapted from a book by Gurdjieff.)

And all the while, he says, he was tasting a bit of everything on offer — in culture, in sex, in drugs (though he was blessed, he says, with a natural resistance to addiction) and in religion.

He had been confirmed as a member of the Church of England when he was 16. “But this at once led me to think why — why is this better than Islam? So I read that, and I read Buddhism. And that led me to India. But all of this was, again: Taste, test, question, and never reach a conclusion.”

His supreme affinity, always, was for storytelling, he says. And in the theater, he found its most congenial, and universal, application. At 21, he directed an effervescent production of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labours Lost” at Stratford; at 23, he was named the producing director of the Royal Opera House; both his interpretations of Shakespeare and of sleek comedies (“The Little Hut”), costume dramas (“Ring Round the Moon”) and even musicals made him the toast of the West End.

Many of the actors he worked with in that period were titans. “A fabulous, fabulous technician,” he says today of Laurence Olivier, “who more than any other actor had developed every known skill. My God, he had everything. But one thing was really lacking in Olivier. There was something inside so ambitious that his feelings were cold.”

Brook, who was by then regularly crossing the Atlantic to work on Broadway (where he oversaw the 1954 cult musical “House of Flowers,” featuring a script by Capote), found himself redefining what it meant to be a director. Improvisation became increasingly important to him. So did the feeling that the meaning of words was less significant than their music, “the flowing rhythm underneath.”

Literal-minded scenery and costumes were dispensed with in favor of a blank slate of a stage. “Simple, pure, simple,” he says, citing as an example the modernist theater teachings of Edward Gordon Craig. “There’s always so much that needs to be trimmed, simplified, purified.”

For the Royal Shakespeare Company, he created a Theater of Cruelty season that included an electrifying, brutally physical interpretation of Peter Weiss’ “Marat/Sade,” set in a post-revolutionary French madhouse and featuring a young Glenda Jackson. Brook won a Tony Award for best director when the production transferred to Broadway and a second for his revolutionary, white box “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” whose circus antics were inspired by a troupe of Chinese acrobats Brook had seen while visiting New York.

By the late 1960s, he was also spending increasing amounts of time in Paris with his wife, actress Natasha Parry (who died in 2015). “There was something there that the solid life of the British middle class would never give,” he says. He quotes — as he will on several occasions always with the same, soft raptness — one of his favorite Shakespeare lines, from “Coriolanus”: “There is a world elsewhere.”

Answering Charges of Appropriation

After founding his theater center in Paris with French producer Micheline Rozan in 1970, he began assembling casts that were indeed international for productions that traveled the world, including “The Conference of the Birds,” adapted from the 12th-century Persian poem.

The monumental “Mahabharata,” adapted from the Sanskrit epic poem, had a cast of 21 performers from 16 countries and toured for four years. (It was seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987.)

A sworn, lifelong foe of colonialism, Brook found himself accused of cultural appropriation.

“When we did it, Indians said, ‘Here you are, colonialists, stealing our heritage.’ I said, ‘No, it belongs to the world.’ And I know that you have little companies all over India who do Shakespeare. Has anyone ever said, ‘This belongs to England’?”

An early pioneer in color- and gender-blind casting, Brook defines the actor as a storyteller who transcends his visible physicality. He cites theater theorist Antonin Artaud’s phrase, “the actor and his double,” and says, “This is the secret, an open secret: No actor and no audience believe for one moment that this is the real person.”

“It’s like there’s the person, the role, and in between is the space where the two meet,” he continues. “That’s what the performance is, where it’s the invisible becoming visible, it’s the space where the two meet.”

Theater reaches its apotheosis, he says, when such a space, outside of time, is occupied by the audience as well as the performers. It can’t happen, he adds, “if the actors are too tense or too ambitious, if the audience is too stupid or laughs too easily. But if these two concentrations, two essences, really come together, for a moment, it’s plain sailing.”

And the best way to honor productions that achieve this state of grace? A stunned, vibrating quiet: “Because what is one step beyond cheering applause is the silence, the living ah, the astonishment, the wow.”

An ‘Age of Darkness’

As a man who has devoted much of his career to erasing cultural boundaries in theater, Brook is appalled by the contemporary resurgence of nationalism. He is not optimistic about the future.

With theatrical appropriateness, a violent rainstorm erupts — chilling the air and hammering the windows so loudly I have to lean in to hear what he’s saying — as he describes the Hindu theory of cycles of civilization (or yugas).

“There is, in Indian terminology, the age of gold, which becomes the age of silver, which becomes the age of lead, which then becomes the age of darkness. And that is, unfortunately, the one we’re in.”

We are so absorbed by cosmic matters that we fail to notice that the rain has been drenching the floor, through one of the French windows that open onto the balcony. When Estienne, who has been at a medical appointment, arrives later, she looks at the pool of water and sighs. “Didn’t you ... ” she starts to ask. She then sighs and returns with a mop.

That morning, the collaborators arrived at a new, less “arbitrary” transition between the two parts of ”Why?,” which is performed by a cast of three and a pianist. The second half is devoted to the tragic final chapters of the lives of Meyerhold and his actress wife, Zanaida, both victims of Stalinist purges.

The first, lighter section begins with a sort of theater creation myth that finds the performers asking God what theater is for. It is not a spoiler to say that the almighty answers their questions with a question.

Brook, for the record, has not been behaving like someone who believes either the world, or his own life, is nearing an end. “My schedule for the rest of the year is terrifying,” he says.

After its run in New York, “Why?” will travel to China, Italy and Spain. His new book, “Playing by Ear: Reflections on Music and Sound” will be released in Britain in October, requiring many personal appearances.

I ask him if he has a new theatrical production in mind. Is there a play by Shakespeare, for instance, that he feels he would still like to conquer? His answer is a firm no. “I’ve never wanted to do a play for its own sake,” he says.

While there must have been some canny professional strategizing in a career of such extraordinary richness and longevity, Brook prefers to see it in other terms.

“There’s a thing I call a hunch,” he says to me just before I leave him. “I like the word because it’s inexplicable. When suddenly, it’s ‘Ah ... that! What about it?’ ”

This article originally appeared in

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