Legendary director Peter Brook (89): Theatre is the field given to me

The Valley of Astonishment. Titles don't come much prettier than that of 'The Valley of Astonishment'. Theatre legend Peter Brook's tentative last play is coming to Amsterdam. The Holland Festival gave me and two journalists from Parool and NRC, respectively, the opportunity to talk to the already legendary director when he was alive. Pretty special, because the man who enchanted an entire generation of theatre-makers and audiences with performances such as the nine-hour Mahabharata in Avignon, is considered a deity among theatre connoisseurs and enthusiasts.

That's because of the book he wrote in the 1960s: The Empty Space. In that book, he argued for an open approach to theatre, for a liberation from the classical rules and structures that had made it a rigid monument of stale elderly entertainment. How vital his own theatre was, he showed the world as artistic director of The Royal Shakespeare Company. He was the first to show Shakespeare in normal clothes, with contemporary sets and a non-elevated acting style. Without Peter Brook, Dutch theatre too would have looked different.

We spoke to the 89-year-old theatre renovator in his own Parisian flat around the corner from the Opera Bastille, the day after we visited his performance at the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, at the back of the Gare du Nord, in what is now known as Little India: a neighbourhood full of Hindustani restaurants, Bollywood video stores and shops full of colourful fabrics and fragrant spices. That old boulevard theatre, whose decay is phenomenally captured in decaying red and crudely sandblasted marble among crumbling ornaments, provided a wonderful backdrop for an extremely austere narrative performance about psychiatric cases who actually turn out to be geniuses.

The Valley of Astonishment is Peter Brook's third piece in his series on this kind of situation. The theme forms one of the main leitmotifs of his work. He was previously seen in the Netherlands with 'The Man Who', which told about the special characteristics of people who cannot lie: sufferers of Gilles de La Tourette syndrome.

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"Our resources are people with exceptional capabilities, who have to pay an exceptionally painful price for it. Because they don't live on the same scale as the rest of humanity. They have something that nobody has. And so they are mostly seen as disabled rather than exceptional."

Extraordinary people with a tragic story

"We (the Bouffes' creative team, ws) have met so many wonderful people over the years. For example, the man who can no longer feel his own body. We have known him for a long time. We have seen in him the living proof of someone who, though completely paralysed and without any awareness of his body, refused to give up. While every neurologist and doctor had already given up on him. He was told to stay on his back until, one day, he would die. He refused that. And now he is a married man, driving a car, able to move like anyone else. Those who don't know don't see that he does that out of sheer willpower. He told us, and this sentence is also in the text, that for him every day is and new marathon. He also told us that for him, Christmas is the happiest day of his life. On that day, there is no one around him, and he can sit alone at home in a chair and let everything hang out. Then he is totally paralysed again and hangs in his chair like a salt bag. For him, that's a holiday. That's incredible."

Main line in the show is the story about someone who is blessed with a phenomenal, synaesthetic memory. That is, he cannot forget anything because he automatically stores everything with other visible and tangible memories. Whereas others can summon this ability through training, and also turn it off where necessary, this person cannot. Which ultimately leads to an unbearable torment: an overflowing memory.

Brook highlights the phenomenon of synesthesia, which amounts to people thinking in smells to images they see, or thinking in images to music they hear: "This turns out to be a much more widespread trait than we have thought for years. It makes it even clearer how none of us experience the world the same way. We don't see light entering this room in the same way. And we all concentrate on something different. And that concentration, in turn, causes us to miss 90 per cent of life."

"Of all the special people we spoke to for this show, almost all of them were treated badly at school, not understood by their environment and punished by their parents. That we now recognise that synesthesia is not a disability but an ability, a unique form of perception, is very important. There are all people coming out now who have that ability."

Part of the charm of The Valley of Astonishment is the beautiful setting in the dilapidated-looking, stripped-down boulevard theatre in which it plays. In Amsterdam, the play will play at the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ. Modern, light, and fitted with sheets of transparent wood. Totally different from Paris. Isn't that awkward for a play that has no setting beyond the theatre itself?

"It is a permanent problem for us to adapt the performances to the venues we play in. We have been making plays at the Bouffes for so long. Every stain on the wall has a relationship with our work. We also toured a lot because we saw it as our responsibility not to keep playing in a small space for a small local audience. But that does mean that with our small team, we always have to put a lot of effort into adapting the work to e space. But that's good, because that's what theatre is all about. Theatre is not a fixed art form. It is something out of life, and so it always has to adapt."

Ship

"When I create a new work, I have to be open to all influences from the world, and that world is changing faster and faster. I sometimes compare us to sailors on a sailing ship. You can't figure out in advance what the crossing will be like. Sometimes it is easy on smooth water, sometimes there are heavy seas, sometimes the weather turns. You have to be ready for anything. Leaving the Bouffes means recreating the same experience on a totally different stage, in a totally different space."

So far, no Peter Brook performance has disappointed. But still the director does not like premieres, that night when all the press and all the important people come to see, and can make or break the play. Even when we saw the performance, with many famous guests, but not in premiere spheres, the master was still drily taking notes a row ahead of us: "For me, the premiere is just a step in the journey. It is the port where you dock for a while before choosing to go to sea again. Everything has to remain in development until the final performance. I have seen so many times that plays, as well as big musicals on Broadway, have broken down because of this obsession that everything has to be proven at that premiere. I have seen performances that had great potential, that could have been fantastic two weeks later, but broke down because of that premiere obsession."

"The audience has an opinion ready right away, in the interval. And the worst thing is that people pay particular attention to certain famous people in the audience, and how they thought it was. People ask friends not how those friends thought it was, but how they think those famous people thought it was."

Brook still has a love-hate relationship with theatre culture, he confides: "For me, theatre has always been a gift from the gods. It is the field that has been given to me, and what I am good at. Some have that with music, others with cooking. The only emotion I have about my work is deep gratitude. Gratitude for having these abilities. For the rest, and a lot of people are shocked by this, I have never been a theatre lover."

"I am part of life, and life throws up all kinds of things. This is my field. And you don't ask a crofter, with only one field, which he knows thoroughly and can work well, whether he likes fields in general. This happens to be my field."

"I do go to see plays, and I admire some people, and I also sometimes like the things they make, but often not. If I didn't go to the theatre for a year, it wouldn't bother me at all. But then really not at all."

"I haven't been to an opera for years. I am passionate about when we do our own opera, but I haven't been to a real opera for 10, 15 years. I also used to be a ballet critic. I wrote ballet reviews for big English newspapers. I haven't been to ballet for 10 years. I don't mind people loving ballet. Life is full of things, and every day brings something different. The theatre is just my field."

But surely the author of so many influential books on Shakespeare has a mission? But no, he declares decidedly: "I don't have a mission. Theatre has a mission. In a society where negative and destruction-oriented forces are becoming stronger and more influential, the theatre is a special moment for a small group of people, and it has to be a small group. An elite. But not an elite in the silly conception of it that has existed since the 1970s. Not a bourgeoisie, that is, but a small group of people who go to the theatre and for a small moment when they are there have an experience that stays with them, because something is opened that is not destructive."

Just as modestly, Brook talks about his most influential book, The Empty Space: "I am obviously happy that so many people have been touched by that book, a book I wrote an incredibly long time ago. The book has certainly offered openings for people to liberate their own thinking about theatre. Because in everything I write, I don't give any set method or theory. I give freedom. Nothing more."

And as to how that worked: that was always a mystery. That Brook brought together actors from all over the world who were unique in their charisma and charisma was obvious. All of them inescapable personalities are on stage at the Bouffes du Nord. But with such top performers, creating something that looks so simple and bright is quite difficult. For years, people begged to attend rehearsals, but Brook always forbade it. Until last year, when he gave his son permission to make a documentary about his "method". That film, The Tightrope, was broadcast by the Franco-German culture channel Arte, and has not yet been shown in the Netherlands.

To us, Brook tells us how he works: "We start with joy. There is joy in the richness, colourfulness and versatility of life. That's freedom. Meeting people, travelling. Making impressions. That's how you find out, over the years, that some things are more essential than others. I have not changed, nor will I change, into a strict monk who says: no sex, go into a monastery, don't talk. No. It's a journey of discovery."

"In rehearsals, I don't start from the idea that there should be something pure. That's what The Empty Space is also about. I do start a rehearsal with the intention of discovering that purity. I clear away what gets in the way, what blocks the view of something stronger. There is space and emptiness around that, but you have to discover it. If you start thinking you have to create emptiness, you end up with something that is dead and abandoned. Our process is always that I call on everyone to do way too much. That's why I never allow spectators into rehearsals. Actors should have the chance to do and say silly things. We can try out the craziest things. That is to be very happy."

So the whole process is to ultimately filter all that abundance down to the most useful and necessary. And then you find out, and this applies to everything, that man, that one individual, is so much richer, so much more meaningful, than the most sophisticated opera house, the most magnificent sets, the most beautiful orchestration. At some point, there comes a point, when something finer appears, among all that weight and dust of tradition. It's a process."

"And with that, and this touches on this performance: you don't forget anything. You pile it up. Things fade into the background, what is valuable comes to the surface. But that's how it is in life too. And with making performances. You don't start with everything written in books, but you start with everything you have experienced in the past."

For young creators today, he has one urgent piece of advice: "That they should go their own way. As long as young people understand that they have to re-examine everything themselves, they will discover their own path. They can't start imitating other people, or reenacting the past. I always say: if you are a young director, you can start working immediately, if you have three friends. In the bedroom of your house. You can start anytime. If young people do not understand that they should not complain that society is unfair by not giving them what they are entitled to, then they are lost. You cannot rule out the possibility of three friends. You always have three friends. Then you can make your first production in the smallest back room, or the basement. Discover everything there. After that, you can read masters like Stanislavski, or The Empty Space. But you have to have discovered it yourself first."

We have now arrived at the lowest level

Brook, despite the cheerfulness and energy he exudes at 89, is not much of a fan of the world. Although he himself also owns the latest-generation smartphone, he does think digitalisation is a step in the wrong direction. He refers to the Mahabharata, the Indian epic that is the oldest known surviving work of literature in human history, older than bible, older than Greek tragedies: "The basis of Hinduism is that humanity reached its very highest point very quickly. In that Vedic period, there was the purest understanding, the purest thought about everything of life. That first era was followed by four eras in which mankind went downhill a bit further each time. We are now at the lowest level. There is enormous activity and production, but at the lowest level."

"On a practical level, it is quite useful. We can use it, it works. But we just can't believe we can live without a mobile phone. We have this screen so we don't have to remember a phone number. Then when you consider that the Mahabharata is made up of 18 chunky volumes, and that those stories have been passed on for centuries without ever being written down, and in fact have never been changed: our memory is nothing compared to that of those times."

"Those huge opportunities are still there, but we are no longer exploiting them. Our capability is being reduced more and more. There is compensation, but not enough. We are now on the brink of a new war. That is terrible when you contrast that with the idealism in philosophy and art, and all the idealism of the United nations, and the League of Nations before that, they could do nothing against those countless murderous wars. The UN should have put an end to that, but it leads badly to poverty. They talk, they have lunches, they write reports on their computers. I do that too, as do you. Can you imagine what it would be like if all the interviews you had ever done were now suddenly all in your head at once?"

But is it really that black?

"I am not a prophet. But if something falls down, it should also bounce back up. There are also more people now who feel they have to go against the grain. It does become increasingly difficult not to participate in all the hypes, because it is very appealing. I hope theatre and music can contribute something to a different view. I like to quote Shakespeare, who writes in Coriolanus: there is a world, elsewhere. That is the most hopeful thing I can think of. We have reached the bottom, the only way now is up."