For that production, he took the colorful, stylized conventions of East Indian theater and anchored them in performance with things hard, practical and real - fire, earth and water. (Two Arts/The Kobal Collection)Īnd he played with form far more aggressively in his theater work, searching for a down-to-earthiness he described in his book The Empty Space and made literal in his nine-hour adaptation of The Mahabharata. Brook chose to cast child non-actors in his 1963 film adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Brook also used hand-held cameras, unusual in 1963, to give Lord of the Flies a spontaneous, unscripted feel. To illustrate the verbal gymnastics in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he put a Royal Shakespeare Company cast on trapezes to explore the fragility of civilization, he turned mostly non-professional children into painted savages in the film Lord of the Flies. Getting at the meaning of performance was Brook's lifelong quest, explored in everything from grand opera to a sort of primal, almost wordless theater. "But as the mad people came and parodied the audience's applause, it was I think a valuable moment of deliberate discomfort because suddenly they saw, yes, but it's not any old show, this show is about something." 'A Flash Of What Seems Like Truth' "When the audience applauded, they were naturally applauding the actors, applauding the show," Brook told NPR in 1992. As the audience cheered, the cast, still twitching and drooling, squelched a standing ovation each night by applauding back mockingly from the lip of the stage, not dropping character until every audience member had left the theater. Even Marat/Sade's curtain call was provocative. (United Artists/The Kobal Collection)īut all those words didn't prepare audiences for the freak show Brook had devised: drooling maniacs in rags rubbing elbows with audience members, shrieking from the stage and ending the night's political diatribe in a full-scale riot. The film version starred Ian Richardson as imprisoned radical Jean-Paul Marat. Brook adapted his Marat/Sade theater production for the screen in 1967. A defining moment in his career was the sensation he created in 1964 a play with a 26-word title seemed to say it all: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, or Marat/Sade for short. He was 97.īrook's work spanned seven decades and ranged from star-studded Shakespeare productions to radical experiments in theater form. Theater and film director Peter Brook has died. HFS clients enjoy state-of-the-art warehousing, real-time access to critical business data, accounts receivable management and collection, and unparalleled customer service.British director Peter Brook smiles after receiving the 2008 Ibsen Award for bringing new artistic dimensions to the world of theater. HFS provides print and digital distribution for a distinguished list of university presses and nonprofit institutions. MUSE delivers outstanding results to the scholarly community by maximizing revenues for publishers, providing value to libraries, and enabling access for scholars worldwide. Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content, providing access to journal and book content from nearly 300 publishers. With warehouses on three continents, worldwide sales representation, and a robust digital publishing program, the Books Division connects Hopkins authors to scholars, experts, and educational and research institutions around the world. With critically acclaimed titles in history, science, higher education, consumer health, humanities, classics, and public health, the Books Division publishes 150 new books each year and maintains a backlist in excess of 3,000 titles.
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