Peter Brook, a pioneering British theater director based in France, has passed away at the age of just 97 years old in Paris.
This director was the first to take theater beyond traditional theatre houses. He mounted productions in unusual venues such as abandoned factories, gymnasiums, and old gas works. He is well-known for his innovative and outside-the-box approach when staging classic and contemporary works.
Born March 21, 1925 in West London, he was the son of parents of Lithuanian Jewish heritage. After attending Oxford and Westminster School, he staged his first production. Dr FaustusIn 1943, at the Torch Theatre in London.
By his early 20s, he had been appointed director of production at the Royal Opera House, where he distinguished himself with an experimental production of Richard Strauss’s SalomeSets created by Salvador Dali, Spanish surrealist artist
He began his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1950s. In this capacity, he directed Sir Lawrence Olivier. Titus Andronicus1955, Stratford.
Brook worked in London and New York during the 1950s and 1960s. His Tony Award-winning production, “The Last of the Wild Roses”, is one of his most famous productions. Marat/SadePeter Weiss, a German playwright, was praised for his daring use of violence and nudity at the time.
In the 1970s, he moved permanently to France to establish his International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris.
In the early days of the ICTR, he famously took its company – which included British actress Helen Mirren and Japanese actor Yoshi Oida – on a tour across the Middle East and Africa to test out his ideas around theater.
After his return, he rebuilt the old Bouffe de Nord music hall to serve as the permanent home of the centre. It opened on October 1974 with a production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens adapted by late French playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.
1985 was one of the landmark ICTR productions. The Mahabharat a nine-hour version of the epic Hindu poem, adapted with Carrière, and the 2005 work Tierno BokarA Malian Sufi was the subject of this article, which led to a worldwide discussion about his life as well as his message of religious tolerance.