Peter Brook

Peter Brook, born in 1925, English stage and motion-picture director, recognized for his contributions to the development of 20th-century theater. He was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford. Brook's success as a director began at a young age with stagings in London in his late teens. He directed English actor Alec Guinness in Vicious Circle (1945) and English actors Paul Scofield and John Gielgud in Venice Preserv'd (1953). Beginning in the 1940s, he directed many productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Brook successfully utilized the experimental theories of German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, among others, in addition to the theater-of-cruelty concept of French writer and actor Antonin Artaud. His noted productions include Marat/Sade (1964; film 1967), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1970), Antony and Cleopatra (1978), The Tempest (1987), and Pelléas and Mélisande (1992).

In 1970 Brook founded the International Centre of Theatre Research, in Paris, to explore the fundamentals of historical and worldwide drama. His international company presented experimental productions, including The Ik (1975); The Conference of Birds (1976), a Persian fable; Ubu Roi (1977); The Cherry Orchard (1981); La tragédie de Carmen, (1983), an adaptation of the opera Carmen (1875), by French composer Georges Bizet; The Mahabharata (1985), a nine-hour adaptation of the Indian epic poem (see Mahabharata); and Qui est la? (1996), an adaptation of Hamlet. Brook's motion pictures, some of which are also experimental in nature, include The Beggar's Opera (1953), Lord of the Flies (1963), Tell Me Lies (1968), King Lear (1971), La Tragédie de Carmen (1984), and The Mahabharata (1989). He has written several books about theater, including The Empty Space (1968), The Shifting Point, 1946-1987 (1987), and The Open Door: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre (1993). Brook's memoir, Threads of Time: Recollections, was published in 1998.