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tru za pozorisna Istraživanja u Parizu, kojim Brook irukovodi od 1970. glumci nekada izvode predstavu za specijalnu publiku decu, 111 ljude koji nikada ranlje nisu videli pozorišni komad. All njegov je oilj uvek traženje unlverzalnijeg pozorišnog jezika; publika za koju će eksperiment biti jednostavan I razumljiv kao populären mjuzikal. Možda ovo objašnjava zašto se on uvek vraća Šekspiru, najpopularnijem dramskom piscu sviti vremena. Predstave koje su Peter Brook-u donele svetsku slavu jesu one koje je režirao u RSC. Poljski kritlčar Jan Kot kaže; »da njegovo interesovanje za Šekspira potiče od Brook-ove predstave TITUS ANDRONIKUS sa Laurence Olivier-om i Vivien Leigh, koja je 1957. gostovala u Istoonoj Evropi.« Brook-ov revolucionarni KRAU LIR je 1963. proneo ime RSC po celom svetu, samo tri godine po njegovom osnivanju. Drug! preokret u njegovoj karijeri ga je odveo od totalnog teatra MARA/SADA do provokaoije improvizovane drame o Vijetnamu (US), koja je njegov najvedi dosadasnji uspeh, i kao eksperiment I kao popolami testar. Kada je Brook-ova predstava SNA LETNJE NOĆI doživela svoju premijeru u Stratfordu (1970), londonski TIMES ju je nazvao »remek-delom«, u SUNDAY TIMES su rekll da je »izvanredno, nešto što čovek doživi jednom u generaoiji«. Kada je 1971. SAN posetio Njujork, Clive Barnes ga le u NEW YORK TIMES-u opisao jednostavno kao »najbolju postavku Šekspira koju je ikada video». U njoj je Brook, složili su se mnogi kritičari, stigao najbliže univerzalnom teatarskom jeziku za kojim se uvek tragaio. (Ronald Bryden)

peter brook At first sight, the guiding power In Peter Brook’s career seems to have been paradox. He entered the theatre only as a short cut to his first ambition, films. A champion for thirty years of “serious" drama, he finds his favourite entertainment and audiences at musicals. A key figure of the twentieth century avant garde, particularly In experiments of Meyerhold, Artaud, and Grotowski, he has created his greatest and often most radical productions for the greatest of classical playwrights Shakespeare. The contradictions run through all three decades of his work. Having made a reputation at twenty as the British interpreter of Sartre and the postwar French

existentialists, he established himself as something more than a boy wonder with an acclaimed Love's Labor’s Lost, designed after Watteau, and a controversial anti-romantic Romeo and Juliet at Stratford-upon-Avon which launched the careers of Paul Scofield and Claire Bloom. The popular success of his Ring Round the Moon, Christopher Fry’s translation of Anouilh’s fairy tale L'lnvitation au Chateau, was followed by a superb Dostoyevskyan Stratford production of Measure for Measure, darkest of Shakespeare's comedies. In the 19505, he sandwiched between Arthur Miller's View from the Bridge andr Tennessee Williams's Cat one a Hot Tit Roof the memorable Scofield Hamlet, first British production to visit the Soviet Union. Between the London and New York productions of the musical Irma la Douce came the totally different exploration of the French underworld In the Paris premiere of Genet's The Balcony. Another musical, The Perils of Scobie Prilt, bobbed up briefly between his RSC King Lear In 1962, with Paul Scofield, and the 1964 Theatre of Cruelty season, also for the RSC, which led up to The Marat/Sade. The contradictions begin to iron themselves out if you go back to the roots of Brook's talent. His parents were scientists, who emigrated to Britain from Russia after the Revolution. He would probably have been a scientist himself had they not given him a toy theatre when he was a child. As it is, he has always treated the theatre as a kind of laboratory, In which the audience forms part of the experiment it was the lure of a wider audience, and its more modern technology, which attracted him first to the cinema (he has made five films, including Moderato Cantabile, Lord of the Files, and most recently a screen version of his RSC King Lear). It is this preoccupation with audiences which has always marked Brook off from the rest of the International avant garde, and sometimes led it to regard him with suspicion. He has never been interested In minority theatre: in experimental rites performed for the benefit of a tiny congregation of the faithful. At the International Centre of Theatre Research which he has run In Paris since 1970, he sometimes makes his actors perform before special audiences children, or people who have never seen a play before. But his object is always the pursuit of a more universal theatrical language; a majority audience before which his experiments will works as simply and directly as a popular musical. This may explain why he always returns to Shakespeare, the greatest popular

dramatist of all. The productions which have brought Peter Brook his world-wide reputation have been those undertaken in hi® capacity as a director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Polish critic. Jan Kott, traces hi® interest in Shakespeare to the Brook production of Titus Andronicus, with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, which toured Eastern Europe in 1957. It was Brook’s revolutionary King Lear which took the name of the RSC, then only three years old, round the world In 1963. Now another swing of his career has carried him from the total theatre of The Marat/Sade, the provocation of his (improvised Vietnam documentary US, to his greatest success so far, both as experiment and popular theatre. When Brook’s RSC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream opened at Stratford in 1970, the London Times called it “a masterpiece”, the London Sunday Times declared It “magnificent, the sort of thing one sees only once in a generation". When It visited New York in 1971, Clive Barnes in the New York Times described it simply as “the greatest production of Shakespeare I have ever seen In my life". In it, most critics agreed, Brook comes nearer than ever before to the universal theatrical language he has always sought. (by Ronald Bryden)

director Almost all Peter Brook's major Shakespeare productions have been for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Work with the RSC includes: SHAKESPEARE: 'Love's Labour's Lost' (1946), .Romeo and Juliet’ (1947), 'Measure For Measure' (1950), 'Titus Andronicus' (1955), 'King Lear’ (1962). MOOREN: Dürrenmatt’s 'The Physicists’ (1963), Weiss's The Marat/Sade' (1967), 'US’ (1966). EXPERIMENTAL: Theatre of Cruelty (LAMDA 1964), Genet's 'The Screens’ (Donmar 1964), 'The Tempest' (Roundhouse 1968). FILMS; The Marat/Sade' (1967), Tell Me Lies' (from 'US', 1968), 'King Lear' (1970). Work outside RSC includes: 'Boris Godunov’ (Covent Garden 1948), 'Hamlet' (Moscow and London 1955/56), Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory’ (London 1956), 'lrma la Douce' (London 1958, New York 1960), Genet's The Balcony’ (Paris I 960), Seneca's

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