First director at 18
The theater has been in Brook’s life since he was a boy, if he signed his first direction at 18 and therefore stands out as an interpreter of Shakespeare’s works, so much so that he became, first, director of London’s Royal Opera House and, in 1962, by the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he combines the classics with a series of modern works and experimental works inspired in particular by the “theater of cruelty” by Artaud, such as a famous “Marat-Sade” by Peter Weiss and “Us” work he did referring to the violence of the war in Vietnam and ended “scandalously” with a strong sign, burning a butterfly alive.
In 1970 he moved to France and founded the Center international de creation theatrale in Paris, where, under the influence of Grotowski and J. Beck’s Living Theater, the possible theatrical applications of a non-significant language, improvised and maximally gestualized. He travels extensively in Africa, improvising shows in the most remote places. Then he returns to Paris where he opens Les Bouffes du Nord and begins to think and work, even with a long stay in India, on the “Mahabarata”, which will become a poetic and rigorous nine-hour show, set up in a stone quarry, a Hindu poem of 70 thousand verses on the origin of the world and its confusion and uncertainty, restoring its profound truth in a babel of languages and races without losing its sense of fairytale.
Active until the last
Since then he has never stopped touring the world with his shows, from the ironic, playful and melancholy ones linked to his African sickness such as “Sizwe Banzi est mort” by Fougard or “The suit”, a scenic reduction of a novel by South African Chan Themba, to a surprising invention such as his “Carmen”, created in 1986 on an earth base, transforming theaters into arenas, with spectators only in the balconies or on the stage, seeking the authentic spirit of the character of Mérimée and reducing Bizet’s work to almost a chamber work, with fifteen instrumentalists and without mystical gulf.
After all, his Mozartian “Magic Flute”, longed for for years and which arrived almost like a testament in 2011 at the Piccolo in Milan, made use of a single piano, a symbolic fairy tale, light and profound, which now remains a bit like the exemplary summa of Brook’s theories and theater, of his “empty stage space” in which intuition leads to distill the meaning of the work through the body and voice of actors of all cultures.
A work carried out to the last as its sixth time just in November 2021 in Solomeo, Umbria, with “La Tempesta” revisited in its own way, with an invisible direction and at the same time very accurate in detail, paired with Marie-Hélène Estienne .