Peter Brooks, who passed away on Sunday at the age of 97, will forever be associated with the legendary theater happening The Mahabharata (1985), the nine-hour epic based on religious-philosophical stories from India, starring the elements fire, water, light and earth. Theater lovers from all over Europe went there; often with organized bus trips. The Mahabharata premiered in a quarry near Avignon and then played an entire season in Brook’s own theater in Paris: the now famous Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. In 1989 Brook directed the film adaptation himself – the duration was reduced from nine to six hours.
Long before the great success of The Mahabharata Peter Brook already made his name in his own country (he was born in London in 1925) with the Royal Shakespeare Company. His directing of King Lear (1962) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) are considered to be his best work.
The Netherlands has a special bond with him: in 2018 the Brandhaarden festival of International Theater Amsterdam was dedicated to his work. He came to Amsterdam a year earlier especially for this purpose to give a public interview to a full house: it became a theater lecture and retrospective at the same time. About the core of the theatre, he said at the time: ‘An actor never plays for himself alone, he is always aware that there is an audience, there is always the other. That is the essence of theatre. Concentration in space and time to experience an entire human life together, for example, as in the tragedy King Lear.Several of his productions were also shown at the Holland Festival, most recently in 2014: The Valley of Astonishment†
Walls with peeling paint
Brooks’s reference work on theater appeared in 1969: The Empty Space †The Empty Space) in which he argued for the most bare possible staging of texts and pieces. He was averse to frills and frills. “When I was young, I threw myself into all kinds of wild experiences with unbridled energy. I met millionaires, kings and dictators. At the same time, I was sleeping on the floor with young people my age. Slowly I learned to eliminate. I do the same with my productions. In the beginning I want everything: sets, costumes, video, spectacle. Gradually I notice that every actor already carries everything in them,” Brooks said in 2018 in de Volkskrant†
In that sense, his Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord fitted in perfectly with his ideas about making theatre: the old vaudeville theater behind the Gare du Nord, which had been damaged by fire and flooding, in 1974, where he took up residence with his group in 1974, has hardly been adapted since. Brook’s performances took place on floors with a long history, and between walls with peeling paint. So bare, so empty. You could say that Erik Vos’ theater at De Appel and Johan Simons’ early work were inspired by his theater of baldness.
He also thought unadorned about death: ‘I have accepted the simple fact from an early age that everything that is born comes to an organic end.’