The Shifting Point: Theatre, Film, Opera 1946-1987
By Peter Brook
Harper and Row

Peter Brook – A Theatrical Casebook
Compiled by David Williams
Methuen

Peter Brook is not only one of the great innovators of Post-war Western theatre he is also one of its most lucid explainers. His first book, The Empty Space, published twenty years ago, reads as freshly and sharply today as it did when Brook first delivered the four Granada Northern lectures on which the book is based. His discussion of the four forms of theatre -the Holy, the Rough, the Immediate and the Deadly – is as deft as a scalpel. In fact he uses a medical analogy himself:

“If we talk of deadly (theatre) let us note that the difference between life and death, so crystal clear in man, is somewhat veiled in other fields. A doctor can tell at once between the trace of life and the useless bag of bones that life has left; but we are less practised in observing how an idea, an attitude or a form can pass from the lively to the moribund.”

It is Brook’s gift to know what the centres of energy in theatre are, such that he can preserve and discard from the classical and experimental repertoires equally. His latest book, with its title The Shifting Point, emphasises in the Preface Brook’s mercurial approach.

“For a point of view to be of any use at all, one must commit oneself totally to it, one must defend it to the very death. Yet at the same time there is an inner voice that murmurs: ‘Don’t take it too seriously. Hold on tightly, let go lightly.”

Elsewhere in the book, Brook reiterates the idea – “I remember a trip to Dublin where I had heard of an Irish philosopher who was very fashionable in university circles. I had not read the book he had written, and I hadn’t even met the man, but I remember a phrase of his, quoted by someone in a bar, which struck me at once; it was the theory of the ‘shifting viewpoint’. It didn’t mean a fickle point of view, but the exploration as made in certain types of X-rays, where changing perspectives give an illusion of density. I still remember today the impression it made on me.”

Brook’s writings reveal a systematic search for the essentials of theatre-in direction, acting, design, performance and in its relation to an audience. He declares himself opposed to the techniques “in which (on) the first day the director gives a speech on what the play’s about and how he’s (sic) going to approach it. I used to do that years ago and eventually I found that that’s a rotten way of starting . . . When I begin to work on a play I start with a deep formless hunch which is like a smell, a colour, a shadow.”

“The director needs only one conception – which he must find in his life, not in art – which comes from asking himself what an act of theatre is doing in the world, why it is there.”

The Shifting Point charts Peter Brook’s disengagement from English theatre where he began in 1946. He admits himself that he arrogantly chose the theatre when he became impatient with the thought that it might take him ten years in films before he’d get a chance to direct. Instead, Brook took to Shakespeare with passion and imagination. He describes Shakespeare as a piece of coal.

“History is a way of looking at things but not one that interests me very much. I’m interested in the present. Shakespeare doesn’t belong to the past. If his material is valid it is valid now. It’s like coal. One knows the whole process of the primeval forest and one can trace the history of coal; but the meaningfulness of a piece of coal to us starts and finishes with it in combustion, giving out the light and heat that we want. And that to me is Shakespeare.”

In a section entitled People on the Way, Brook writes of those who have shed light on his work. The aestheticist Gordon Craig, eccentric son of Ellen Terry and cousin of Gielgud, designing stage miniatures in a shabby pension in the South of France, Julian Beck of New York’s Living Theatre, Samuel Beckett and Marcel Ayme, the French writer who prompted Brook to observe: “In France one can be more honest, more true to life than in England. Here we are all caught up in a conspiracy to hide the truth from ourselves in a cloud of hopefulness and charm.”

Instead, Brook found direction and provocation from Artaud, Grotowski, Peter Weiss, author of Marat/Sade – and the so-called Theatre of Cruelty. As Brook explains, “Artaud used the word cruelty not to invoke sadism but to call us toward a theatre more rigorous, or even, if we could follow him that far, pitiless to us all.”

Inevitably Brook was becoming an internationalist, perceiving the world as a can opener as he put it. In 1970 he moved to Paris to found his International Centre for Theatre Research. Actors came from all over to join. “Our first principle, Brook recalls, was to make culture, in the sense of culture that turns milk into yoghurt. We aimed to create a nucleus of actors who could later bring ferment to any wider group with whom they worked.”

Brook’s approach, as always, was rigorous technically, psychologically, linguistically. The results were Orghast, written in collaboration with the poet Ted Hughes, and The Conference of the Birds, adapted from the work of the Sufi poet Attar. The CIRT and Brook went on journeys both metaphorical and actual, travelling all over the African continent performing, observing and learning.

Then the Centre of Theatre Research became a Centre of Creation in the Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris, evolving productions of Timons of Athens and The Ik, based on anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s account of an African tribe driven to chaos and cruelty by starvation. In “An Aborigine I Presume” reprinted from the Sunday Times, Brook recalls a performance at Ernabella near Alice Springs. “I tell them the story of The Ik and realise that in telling them about an African tribe brutally deprived of its land I am telling them their own story as well.”

The Shifting Point is a series of brilliant shards. The writing, plain, concise, is compulsively readable. Brook writes about his opera productions with designer Rolf Gerard and conductor Pierre Monteux and his films from Marat/Sade through to Meetings with Remarkable Men. The essay on Lord of the Flies is particularly engaging: “My experience showed me that the only falsification in Golding’s fable is the length of time the descent to savagery takes. His action takes about three months. I believe if the cork of continued adult presence were removed from the bottle, the complete catastrophe could occur within a long weekend.”

And with the Festival performance at Anstey’s Hill quarry only a stone’s throw away it is time to mention The Mahabharata. Brook describes his introduction to this massive narrative from the Sanskrit scholar Philippe Lavastine. Brook and collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere then travelled extensively in India to prepare for the project.

In his splendidly detailed Casebook on Brook, David Williams has gathered reviews, interviews and articles on, and by, Brook spanning his work from 1962 to the present (including The Mahabharata.) In an interview Brook describes it as the culmination of a series of experiments that he has made and, like all experiments, a way of returning to the source. It’s that shifting point again.

Williams’ Casebook and The Shifting Point combine well to remind us of the breadth, integrity and intellectual clarity of Peter Brook’s Theatre. They also make us impatient for the arrival this month of his most recent major work.

“Brook Review”, The Adelaide Review, No.47, February, 1988, pp. 25-6.