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’Oedipus' (National Theatre 1968): 'Moderato Cantabile’ (film 1960), ’Lord Of The Flies’ (film 1963), author of 'The Empty Space'. in 1970 he formed the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris. A fuller biography (written by Ronald Bryden) awwears in the RSC’s special souvenir programme.

life and joy At an early rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford-on-Avon one of the actors asked Peter Brook “How can you define what it is we’re looking for?” His answer was that the work they were doing would take them in a thousand different directions but it was all towards a definition which couldn’t be formulated In advance. If it could, the work wouldn’t be worth attempting. Brook has never been one to pursue straight lines. “1 believe that the only way one finds anything is through the radar system of finding one point, two points, three points, and somewhere in between those is what you’re looking for. For this reason I've really spent all my working life in locking for opposites. For instance very early on, if I worked in Shakespeare. I’d then want to do a commercial comedy, if I'd worked in television. I’d want to go to opera. This is a dialectical principle of finding a reality through opposites.” His choice of A Midsummer Night's Dream as his first Shakespearian production since bis King Lear with Paul Scofield in 1962 can be seen in these terms. “It seemed that having worked on the Marat-Sade, US, Oedipus and the series of King Lears that’s spread over seven years, including two for the film, it was absolutely essential to go to another part of the world where there was a different sort of lite and joy.” But how does a director like Brook approach a play like the Dream? The first thing is always a series of exercises, some physical, some vocal, some Improvisational, aimed to make the actors work more freely together as a group. “This is something that always has to be renewed. The fact that the group worked well last wek doesn’t mean that it will this week.” The second thing is to arrive at what he calls “a collective unedrstandlng" of the play, which can’t be achieved simply by making an explanatory speech, “because eventually the quality of the result de-

pends on a shared understanding, not on one man’s view. For an actor to go on the stage with the conviction that really carries to an audience, he has to know what he’s talking about, to believe, to be inwardly committed. An actor who is representing something which he, knows to be true because he’s shared in the discovery has no embarrassment about presenting it. On the contrary, he wants it to be known.” Working on US, Brook started off by asking his actors what they all believed about the war in Vietnam. “In the case of the Marat-Sade, we could use the true, lived material of each of the actors, who nearly always had had an encounter with madness. Three quarters of the families of the world have madness in them. 'Anybody seen a madman?’ Everybody said 'Yes. 1 know one. 1 am one'. But get a group together and say 'What do fairies mean to you?' No good answers will come out of that. 'Anybody seen a fairy?' 'No'. 'Are, you a fairy Slashes. One voice saying 'Well, maybe, Yes’. But until you get past that stage, you can't start working on the Dream. First-hand experience is needed and the only first-hand experience you can get Is trying to explore the text, using specific acting methods. Where someone In a library uses intellectual and analytical methods to try to discover what a play is about, actors try to discover through the voice, through the body, through eperiment In action. “In those exercises on The Tempest which were seen in public at the Round House, there was a lapanese actor who, by approaching Ariel through his breathing and through his body, made Ariel something very understandable. A certain force became tangible In something which to the Japanese was easy to understand because In the basis of the Noh theatre, from which he came, there was a certain type of sound, a certain type of cry, a certain type of breath. The idea of that force was truly, represented. It could de discussed because It had suddenly happened. There it was amongst us. It was no longer force, an abstract movement, it was force, a reality, something which could even influence other people." Brook believes it is wrong to direct the Dream as if the fairies, the aristocrats and the mechanicals belonged to three different worlds. “The more one examines the play the more one sees how these worlds interweave.” He has the same actor playing Oberon and Theseus, the same actress Titania and Hippolyta, the same actor Puck and Philostrate. He is also, as always, very conscious of how deliberately Shakespeare uses

prose sequences. In the Dream the mechanicals' scenes are written in prose. “The prose world In Shakespeare always suggests that one has to look outwards: the verse world is a world in which you look Inwards Into the text In the sense that it’s a concentration of the meaning. One can’t start with a sense that one has to embroider. But the prose portions demand turning into a flesh and blood existence for which realistic elements have to be found. If you think in terms of social realism about a group of artisans attempting—because they believe in It passionately to put on a romantic play, that play of Pyramus and Thlsbe at once takes off in a different direction. This isn’t an interpretation but a direction dictated by a realism which, while ill-applied to a poetic world, is directly called for by a prose world.” Brook also realizes how important it is to solve the problem of why Shakespeare, who by the time he wrote the Dream did nothing by accident, put the play of Pyramus and Thlsbe in the key position. Instead of ending the play, as he could have done, with the reconciliation of the lovers, which comes at the end of Act Four, he built the whole of Act Five around the play-within-the-play. “One has then to revise one's views of the entire play In relation to why It is that the play couldn't exist, couldn’t have its meaning, without this last act.” “is there a short answer to that question?” “I think so", Peter Brook said, “but I can only express it In performance.” (Ronald Hayman, the Times Saturday Reviaw, 29 avgust 1971)

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