Figures from the world of theatre have expressed their admiration for the director Peter Brook after his death at the age of 97.
He was described as a visionary and a giant in his field, known for his bold reworking of Shakespeare. Peter Brook, the theatre director whose radical productions included A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed on trapezes and stilts, has died at the age of 97.
Brook’s death was announced by his son Simon on Twitter alongside a photograph of them together.
Actors and directors expressed their admiration for a visionary whose reworking of Shakespeare and embrace of avant garde writers transformed people’s expectations of theatre.
Many tributes were from France, where Brook moved in the 1970s to set up a theatre company. He once described British postwar theatre as “oldfashioned, stereotyped and in the hands of a small number of very conventional people who did Shakespeare in the most boring way imaginable”.
Brook, who died on Saturday, was born in Chiswick, west London. and attended Westminster School and Oxford University. His first production was of Dr Faustus in 1943 at the Torch Theatre in London. He went on to become director of productions at the Royal Opera House. Brook was among the first in theatre to focus on increasing the diversity of his productions.
Yet the pinnacle of his imagination was surely the celebrated nine-hour staging of The Mahabharata, an ancient Sanskrit epic that emerged in 1985 encompassing fire, earth, air and water. Yet Brook was never one to get stuck in a groove. He told how, after The Mahabharata, he was swamped with invitations to work similar magic on Beowulf, Icelandic myths or German myths.
He directed half a dozen more films, of which the best was Lord of the Flies (1963). In many respects The Empty Space was the apotheosis of his influence on British theatre, its “commandments” achieving a similar status to those handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai — they existed to be followed and broken in equal measure.
Brook left Britain in 1970 to travel the world, exploring theatre practices in other cultures and testing his theories and the limits of his thespians in every fly-blown African village in which he parked his magic carpet.
