B. 1925 LondonEducated :Oxford1970 formed CIRTInternational Centre for Theatre ResearchBouffe du Nord,Paris

ArtaudBrechtMeyerholdGrotowski

‘Responsibility to theatre-going audiences, remembering that, as a performing group, we cannot survive without a relationship with the people who keep the theatre in existence’

‘To create a relationship with the people who would never cross the door to a theatre in a thousand years, by seeing them on their own ground in schools, meeting places and open-air places’

‘The responsibility to itself and it’s craft….the actor…must constantly…develop himself in relation to others…through group exercises…and, at the same time, increase the general understanding of the mysterious nature of that craft itself by trying out things that have not been tried before’, Kaleidoscope 1978

‘Our first principle, we decided, was to make culture, in the sense of culture that turns milk into yoghurt - we aimed to create a nucleus of actors who could later bring ferment to any wider group with whom they worked. In this way, we hoped that the special privileged conditions we were making for a small number of people could eventually enter into the theatre’s mainstream’

CIRT took established actors from all over the world to extend them

Looked for people to bring different colours-’something that goes through to the soul’

Sense of the individual but within a team‘..the real exercise with a group of actors is not for the person by himself….it’s to make the group more sensitive to itself.’

Active research and preparation as ‘clearing of paths’ - a point where body, intellect and emotions are open

Emphasis on ‘preparation’ rather than ‘training’

Like Grotowski’s via negativa, ‘unlearning’ the actor - no box of tricks

PB ‘Bring everything back to the level where there is no effort.’

What is theatre?

Exercises and gamesImprovised performances - carpet shows

TouringLanguageSense of communityTIME !

develop actors capacity to articulate inner impulses, conveying them externally - ‘Transparency’

make these forms as simple and economic ie clear, as possible - ‘distillation’ -

unsettle actors habitual responses and open up different energies, using different performing conditions and audiences

use structure and play as interwoven supports

use research as self-research - evolution and individual development in which theatre is the means but not the end. ‘Theatre as a means to go beyond theatre’

Theatre as re-membering : mythical narratives or fables actualised here and now thus ‘re-uniting the community, in all it’s diversity, within the same shared experience’

Trying to create an international language of sound, ‘an exploration of the musical power of language in ancient rituals where sound is everything’

With Ted HughesLanguage and production called ‘Orghast’

Epic Indian poem 15 times longer than the Bible

10 years to ‘rehearse’Nine hour adaptation, 1985Toured in English and FrenchBecause it ‘cover(s) the whole of human experience’

‘..Brook in fact used the Mahabharata to revolutionize theatre itself, and to assert it as spectacle’ and ‘is thus a bold attempt to give theatre life again’ Vijay Mishra, "The Great Indian Epic and Peter Brook," in Meanjin, 1988

adaptation of Hamletthe performance mixes scenes from the play-ending in the death of Ophelia-with a discussion among the actors on theories of acting.These passages are culled from Craig,Meyerhold,Stanislavsky,Brecht and Artaud’

bare stage, 3 chairs, no French actors

‘Shoot first, ask questions afterwards is experience first, and only afterwards try to discover what that means. That goes through every side of the experience, including rehearsal, preparation, even like tonight, talking about theatre’

‘We wanted to get away from the idea of a company, and yet we did not want to shut ourselves away from the world, in a laboratory’

Read off the paper Barry ! (P2)

Peter Brook ‘A Theatrical Casebook’ comiled by David Williams

‘Peter Brook and the Mahabarata’ edited by David Williams

‘The Open Door : Thoughts on Acting and Theatre’

lots of other booksthe Internetinterview on ‘The South Bank Show’