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Peter Brook: A Biography, by Michael Kustow
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Peter Brook is one of the world's legendary theater directors. His productions are a byword for imagination, energy, and innovation. From his ground-breaking production of Marat/Sade, to his "white box" A Midsummer Night's Dream, to his monumental staging of The Mahabharata and beyond, Brook has always been the pioneer of what a director and a company of actors can conjure out of an empty stage. In this first authoritative biography, arising out of an association and friendship with Brook over forty years, Michael Kustow tells the fascinating and revealing story of a man whose life has been a never-ending quest.
Born into a Russian �migr� family in London, Brook has been fascinated by theater and film since childhood. He studied at Oxford, where he made a film of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and was almost sent down during his turbulent undergraduate years. As a brilliant young man influenced by the theatrical visionary Gordon Craig, he turned his hand to Shakespeare, opera, new French drama, and mainstream comedy. Following Craig's philosophy, Brook began to search for a simplicity, harmony, and beauty that would incorporate all aspects of the stage production under the control of one person. He also began the lifelong search for authenticity on the stage, a search that led him around the world from London to New York, to his legendary Th��tre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, to Broadway and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was in Paris, in the 1970s, that he attempted to discover a universal language of theater with an international group of actors. This collaboration resulted in a series of visually spectacular and innovative shows including The Ik, The Conference of the Birds, and The Mahabharata.
In his long and influential career, he worked with some of the world's greatest actors and writers including Glenda Jackson, Paul Scofield, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Irene Worth, Jeanne Moreau, Peter Weiss, and Truman Capote. His films, such as Lord of the Flies, Moderato Cantabile, King Lear (with Paul Scofield), The Beggar's Opera, and the film of Marat/Sade moved the camera and the screen to borders they had not reached before. His book The Empty Space continues to be one of the classic works on theater and drama in the Western canon and his memoir, Threads of Time, gave us a glimpse into his personal development. In this biography, based on extensive interviews with Peter Brook and many of the actors, writers, producers, and directors he's worked with throughout his life, Michael Kustow goes to the heart of Brook's theater, his self-searching and his unceasing desire to produce work that redefines theater and life.
- Sales Rank: #8565950 in Books
- Published on: 2005-03-01
- Format: Bargain Price
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
From Booklist
What Peter Brook has achieved in his 80 years is remarkable. Firmly rooted in tradition and constantly innovating, he achieved early commercial success in London's West End. He became one of the most visionary theater directors, found a comfortable niche in the British film industry, and established a well-regarded English- and French--language theater in Paris. He directed some of the most influential Shakespeare productions in Anglo-American theater and devoted much of the latter half of his life to exploring nontraditional, non-Western styles of theater, creating stage adaptations of two canonical religious texts, the Sufi Conference of Birds and the Hindu epic The Mahabarata. He wrote the book on contemporary theater, The Empty Space (1968). Kustow's in-depth study focuses tightly on Brook the artist, describing in fascinating detail Brook's evolution from brilliant but spoiled child to internationally known and respected director, writer, and theater guru. Kustow's biography really gives one a sense for the man behind the curtain, and this despite the fact that Kustow spends precious little time on Brook's personal life. Jack Helbig
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Praise for Peter Brook
"As an actor I have found Peter Brook to have an extraordinarily concentrated and penetrating understanding of the emotional and practical requirements demanded by the needs of authors and actors. Michael Kustow's book seems to me a masterly study of a special man of the theatre. I have worked with Peter closely and often, and there is much in this account of his life and his work which is quite new to me."
- Paul Scofield
"A bountifully detailed record of Brook's marvelously driven life, expertly charted, and described in devotion. Kustow's work combines the meticulous attention of a vastly informed biography with an increasingly personal astonishment at his subject's unending processes of self-transformation. In essence the book is a heart-felt validation of one of the world's enchanted obsessives: a greatly compelled and compelling Artificer, in life long thrall to the unceasing imperatives of new creation. It is a wonderous story."
- Peter Shaffer
"Peter Brook has been an inspiration and a challenge to all of us who work in the theatre. He's a giant. He's one of the greatest innovators in the last half of the twentieth century. Michael Kustow's book is fascinating, brilliant, thorough and entertaining. I will treasure it."
- Andre Gregory, director, My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd St.
"I cannot imagine anyone interested in theater (or remarkable men) not enjoying this book. Michael Kustow has written a compulsively readable account of Peter Brook's extraordinary (and continuing) life's journey: balanced, incisive and truly inspirational."
- Harvey Lichenstein
"Michael Kustow's absorbing biography of Peter Brook illuminates the life and creative achievements of one of the greatest and most influential stage directors in theatre history. Enriched by theatrical insights and copious research, Kustow provides a wealth of details about Brook's groundbreaking productions, such as Marat/Sade, Midsummer Night's Dream, Conference of the Birds, Mahabharata, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, as well as broadening our understanding of Brook's profound book on the theatrical avant-garde, The Empty Space."
- David Krasner, Yale University
About the Author
Michael Kustow is a theater and film producer as well as a journalist and theater critic. He is the author of Theatre@risk and Tank: An Autobiographical Fiction. He lives in London.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
peter brook
By Coyote
If you are a theater person or someone who loves the theater and would like to know about how this marvelous man became the greatest, most influential director in the western world, this is the book for you. I would also recommend "The Empty Space" by Peter Brook himself, or any other of his books.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Candid Camera
By James Moore
Perhaps when Peter Brook celebrates his hundredth birthday we may anticipate a retrospect with some revelatory twist, stylistic shimmer, or special insight into this bafflingly complex character.
Meantime we have Michael Kustow's Peter Brook: A Biography, a well-meant journalistic reprise with all the poetry of "the time sponsored by Accurist". We are reminded that Brook's `white box' production of `A Midsummer Night's Dream' was a succ�s fou; that his book The Empty Space re-energised theatre; and that he discreetly resonates to the spiritual teaching of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.
During his long life Brook has met many people with interests similar to his own: and certainly many with magnetic readership pull - Castro, Grotowski, Hitchcock, Capote, Aleister Crowley, and Jean Genet (whom he alarmingly wanted to be Godfather to his daughter). Yet significantly A.W.O.L from Kustow's text and ten-page index is William Segal, hero of A Voice at the Borders of Silence.
If Kustow's is a dutiful exhumation, the Segal item (fulsomely prefaced by Brook) is an unindexed and undisciplined scrapbook, thrown together like a rich plum pudding by its subject's widow Marielle Bancou-Segal. So blatantly does it sacrifice critical vigilance on the altar of conjugal love that it bids to give hagiography a bad name. Everyone gets swept away in a Tsunami of mutual admiration: Segal thinks gods to Brook, while Brook recklessly asserts that Segal's "innermost core was an opening to eternity".
Thirty evocative photographs redeem Kustow's biography (not least David Farrell's trapeze-lofted Oberon and Puck in the fairy realm above Bottom and Titania) and Brook himself is modestly presented...Segal was anything but camera-shy, blatantly viewing his entire existence as a serial photo-opportunity. When young he was photogenic in All-American mode: in old age, following a drastic car accident, he deployed a monocle and piratical black eye patch. He was an artist too. "William Segal the painter", explains Brook, "looks at the outside world and leads us into William Segal the man." He certainly does. Most of his paintings are self-portraits; his motive being analytical - and apropos he nods kindly to Rembrandt.
Brook has powered forward from Doctor Faustus in 1943 to Tierno Bokar in 2004, like a self-fulfilling prophecy - "a man who has guided his own profusion to a rich simplicity" claims Kustow, in his best sentence. By contrast, the young New York sophomore William Segal, heralded as the speediest left halfback of a decade and sentenced to "a brilliant gridiron future", quickly swerved vocationally. Of Romanian Jewish ancestry and entrepreneurial flair, he somehow broke into fashion publishing and became emancipatingly rich. Looking down from his elegant office in Empire State Building, he would sometimes ruminate on profit margins, sometimes on difficulties facing "the average person", and sometimes on Meister Eckhart.
Aptly enough, in the early 1940s, aged about thirty-eight, Segal chanced to fall in with the author of Tertium Organum Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky ("a regular fellow in many ways"); in 1947, the year Ouspensky died, Segal met the prolix Zen theoretician Daisetzu Teitaro Suzuki - cultivating him and even taking him to meet Madame Ouspensky and watch sacred dances at Mendham, New Jersey; in 1948 and 1949 Segal won sporadic contact with Gurdjieff himself, teacher both of Ouspensky and of the avant-garde lesbian Jane Heap. By 1951 Brook, aged twenty-six, had become a pupil of Heap in London, and Segal had launched the bon ton journal Gentry ("It truly had a superior audience")...Curious lines were now converging.
It is Brook's endorsement of Kustov's biography which dignifies it; here then is the memorial or C.V. favoured by a first-rank cultural icon...Arguably more oblique is the American book's significance. The wearisome extolling and self-extolling of Segal ranks for nothing historically compared with the en passant disclosure of how traditional Gurdjieffian praxis was radically modulated by a hitherto unsuspected coterie; those photographs alone are as revealing as a C.C.T.V. camera.
Gurdjieff, who died in 1949, never went to Japan but Segal did - and became entranced. Arriving in a B-24 bomber carrying introductory letters from D.T.S. ("I could see I was on the beam with Suzuki right from the start") he hit the Zen Buddhist trail. As year followed year, Segal captured the interest of Madame Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieff's de facto successor, and her son Michel the heir apparent. Respectively at Kita Kamakura and Ryutaku-ji monasteries Segal introduced the de Salzmanns to Suzuki and Soen Nakagawa Roshi (superb calligraphist, haiku composer, and innovatory celebrant of the tea ceremony using instant coffee and polystyrene cups).
The striking Sacred Dances which climax Peter Brook's film Meetings with Remarkable Men are supremely ranked in the portfolio of Gurdjieffian praxis, and no-one has prospered them more than Jeanne de Salzmann. In Japan she nevertheless allowed herself to be persuaded by an insistent Segal and Nakagawa that they needed buttressing by Zen-like meditation `sits'. Difficult to guess the critical moment when Madame de Salzmann acceded. Perhaps it was in cherry blossom time in 1966 when Suzuki, crying "Here, Mr Segal!", threw a startled cat at him. Certainly the grand policy shift delighted Segal: "Because you can sit for 100 years and still say, oh yeah, I feel good."
Segal died in 2000, aged ninety-six. And had he actually met Brook? Oh indeed, time after time (and sports ten photos to clinch it). As for his `enlightenment', one only wishes it were susceptible of forensic proof. Yet if this self-fixated pilgrim inspired just one "average person", let alone Peter Brook, that must suffice.
James Moore, Gurdjieff's biographer, undertook
the Gurdjieff module in the Dictionary of
Gnosis and Western Esotericism.
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