What impressed me most about Brooke? As one would expect from the great wanderer of modern theatre, his boundless curiosity. This took many forms. He was always fascinated, to begin with, by the mechanics of the interview. He wanted to know how the tape recorder worked, who gave the green light to the radio studio, how I would broadcast a written interview. He was also endlessly curious about the state of British theatre. He always wanted to hear about the latest productions and was particularly keen to learn about the RSC. The last I heard from him was in response to a piece I wrote about the future of the company, where I floated the idea that it might be time for an actor to take the helm. I received an email from Brooke’s sister-in-law, Nina Soufy, who said that Peter had seen the piece and was widely supportive. Another thing I took away from our interviews was Brooke’s agreement with my thesis that the neat division of his career into two phases, after he moved to Paris in 1970, was artificial. I have long argued that Brook’s quest for greater simplicity was visible in performances such as the 1957 Stratford Tempest and the 1958 musical Irma la Douce. Equally his love of theatrical magic informed his work at Bouffes du Nord. But Brooke himself in an interview we did in Manchester in 1994 revealed that for him the real change in his approach came with the Theater of Cruelty season staged at Lamda in 1964. He told me that in the past he had always been forced to work in a fixed schedule and yield results. Peter Brook directs a rehearsal of the Mahabharata in the North Sea. Photo: Julio Donoso/Sygma/Getty Images That Artaud-inspired season gave him the freedom, for the first time in his career, to experiment, although he gave a public performance and fueled his Marat/Sade production. If there is a divide in Brook’s life and work, I suspect it comes from the shaman/showman contrast I coined many years ago and which has been much repeated. It’s a neat pun, but I feel slightly guilty about it, since a shaman is a priest who claims to communicate with gods. Brooke made no such claim: he was simply a filmmaker, as he once told me, “penetrating human issues through human material.” If Brooke was in constant search, he never lost the showman’s instinct. I once asked him why, in his austere production of La Tragédie de Carmen, he presented a burst of lavishly recorded Bizet just before the climax. “Well,” he said, “the audience always needs a lift four-fifths of the way through a show.” The best example of his flamboyance, however, came when I saw the production of The Mahabharata in Zurich in 1987. The evening began with a speech by Brook in which he boldly told the audience: “We will spend the night together. ” I never knew Brooke prefaces his show with an intro and I wondered why he did that. I had my answer about 11 hours later when, as this saga of death and destruction ended on a note of healing harmony, the back wall of the theater parted to reveal dawn sunlight dancing on the waters of Lake Zurich. Brooke had timed everything to perfection so that, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, he seemed to have nature itself at his command.
