Threads of Time: Recollections - Softcover

Brook, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582430187 ISBN 13: 9781582430188

Publisher: Catapult, 1999

Synopsis

Director Peter Brook reveals the myriad sources driving his lifelong passion for finding the most expressive way to tell a story. Over the years we watch his metamorphosis from traditionalist to radical innovator, witnessing his expanding field of vision and sense of dramatic possibility.

For fifty years, Peter Brook's opera, stage, and film productions have held audiences spellbound. His visionary directing has created some of the most influential productions in contemporary theater. Now at the pinnacle of his career, Brook has given us his memoir, a luminous, inspiring work in which he reflects on his artistic fortunes, his idols and teachers, his philosophical path and personal journey. In this autobiography, the man The New York Times has called "the English-speaking world's most eminent director" and The London Times has named "theater's living legend" reveals the myriad sources behind his lifelong passion to find the most expressive way of telling a story. Whether in India's epic "Mahabharata" or a stage adaptation of Oliver Sak's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, South Africa's "Woza Albert" or "The Cherry Orchard," Brook's unique blend of practicality and vision creates unforgettable experiences for audiences worldwide.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Brook received his M.A. at Oxford, where he founded the Oxford University Film Society. A former codirector of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he currently heads the International Centre of Theatre Research, which he founded in Paris in 1971. He has directed more than fifty productions, and his films include the original Lord of the Flies. He lives with his wife Natasha Parry in Paris.

From the Back Cover

For fifty years, Peter Brook's opera, stage, and film productions have held audiences spellbound. His visionary directing has created some of the most influential productions in contemporary theater. Now at the pinnacle of his career, Brook has given us his memoir, a luminous, inspiring work in which he reflects on his artistic fortunes, his idols and teachers, his philosophical path and personal journey. In this autobiography, the man The New York Times has called "the English-speaking world's most eminent director" and The London Times has named "theater's living legend" reveals the myriad sources behind his lifelong passion to find the most expressive way of telling a story. Whether in India's epic Mahabharata or a stage adaptation of Oliver Sask's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, South Africa's Woza Albert or The Cherry Orchard, Brook's unique blend of practicality and vision creates unforgettable experiences for audiences worldwide.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Threads of Time

RecollectionsBy Peter Brook

Counterpoint Press

Copyright © 1999 Peter Brook
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781582430188
Chapter One

I could have called this book False Memories. Not because I wantconsciously to tell a lie but because the act of writing proves that there isno deep freeze in the brain where memories are stored intact. On the contrary,the brain seems to hold a reservoir of fragmentary signals that have neithercolor, sound, nor taste, waiting for the power of imagination to bring them tolife. In a way, this is a blessing.

    At this moment, somewhere in Scandinavia, a man with a prodigious capacityfor total recall is also recording his life. I am told that as he puts downevery detail that his memory provides, it is taking him a year to write ayear, and as he started late he can never catch up. His predicament makes itclear that autobiography has another aim. It is to peer into a bewilderingconfusion of indiscriminate, incomplete impressions, never quite this, neverquite that, in an attempt to see whether, with hindsight, a pattern canemerge.

    As I write, I do not feel a compulsion to tell the whole truth. It isimpossible, however hard one tries, to penetrate into the obscure areas ofone's own hidden motivations. Indeed, there are taboos, hang-ups, and areas ofobscurity behind this story that I am not exploring, and I certainly do notfeel that personal relationships, indiscretions, indulgences, excesses, namesof close friends, private angers, family adventures, or debts ofgratitude--which alone could fill a ledger--can have a place here, any morethan the well-known splendors and miseries of first nights. I have no respectat all for the school of biography that believes if every social, historical,and psychological detail is added together, a true portrait of a life appears.Rather, I side with Hamlet when he calls for a flute and cries out against theattempt to sound the mystery of a human being, as though one could know allits holes and stops. What I am trying to weave together as best I can are thethreads that have helped to develop my own practical understanding, in thehope that somewhere they may contribute usefully to someone else's experience.

The nurse tries to be kind to the five-year-old boy, who is puzzled at findinghimself in a hospital bed in the middle of the night. "Do you like oranges?"she asks. "No," I answer stubbornly. Irritated that her customary trick hasfailed, she loses her patience. "You're going to have them anyway," shesnaps, and I'm wheeled to the operating theater. "Here, smell these oranges,"she says, as a mask is clamped over my nostrils. Immediately, there is aroaring and a bitter smell, a wild plunging and a surging swing upward. I tryto hold on, but I lose; noise and fear merge into pure horror, then oblivion.It was a first disillusion, and it taught me how hard it is to let go.

Years go by. I am dressed for war. It's a disguise; this anonymous figurecan't be me. But there's a war on and a student at Oxford has to pay for hisprivileges once a week by training to be an officer, because an undergraduateis officer material. Since childhood, the thought of war has terrified me, butbecause it seemed to take place far outside normal time, I always believedthat if it came, I could escape by hiding under my bed for the duration. NowI see that I can't get out of it so easily and, all excuses and evasionshaving failed, I'm on parade, in heavy boots and a scratchy tunic.

    Today is our first experience of the Obstacle Course. When the whistleblows, we set off, the sergeants shouting encouragement and all theenthusiasts charging forward, with leaps at the ropes, vaulting over thebarriers, eagerly scaling the scaffolding. I come last, from school days aprofessional shirker, ignoring the sergeant's jeers, dragging myselflaboriously over the mock-up walls and instead of jumping, sliding down untilI hang by one hand, before dropping cautiously to the ground. By the time itcomes to crossing the river on a log, the others have long since reached theother bank and are vanishing with joyful shouts into the distance. Thesergeant waits for me. "Come on, sir!" he roars. The tone is insulting, but Iam a budding officer, so the "sir" is mandatory.

    I put my great boot on the log and grab a branch from an overhanging tree.Now both feet are on the log. "Come on, sir!" I advance. "Let go of thebranch!" I do so. Two more steps, I reach up to steady myself and catch holdof a leaf. The leaf gives me courage, I walk forward, my balance is good, Ican manage. The log stretches ahead of me across the water, the sergeantbeckons encouragingly. Another step. The hand holding the leaf is even with myshoulder; another step and it's behind me. I'm balanced, confident, but myarm's fully extended. I can't take another step unless I let go of the leaf,and I can't let go. "Let go of the leaf!" the sergeant bellows. "Damn it, letgo of that bloody leaf!" I resist. He roars. I call on all my willpower toforce my fingers to let go, but they refuse. With my arm way behind me, I tryto go forward. The leaf still gives me confidence, my arm is stretched to itsfull limit, it pulls me one way, my feet go the other. For a moment, I leanlike the Tower of Pisa, then at long last I let go of the leaf and fallsplashing into the stream below.

    Again and again I return to this picture: the log and the leaf have becomepart of my private mythology; in a way they contain the essential conflictthat I have tried all my life to resolve--when to cling to a conviction, andwhen to see through it and let go.

When I was a child, I had an idol. It wasn't a protective deity, it was a filmprojector. For a long while, I was never allowed to touch it, as only myfather and my brother could understand its intricacies. Then the time camewhen I was considered old enough to attach and thread the little reels ofnine-and-a-half-millimeter Pathe film, to set up a tiny cardboard screen withinthe proscenium of my toy theater and to watch with ever-repeated fascinationthe scratched gray images. Despite my love for the pictures it produced, theprojector itself was a dour and charmless machine. There was, however, a shopI would pass every day on my way back from school, and in the window stood acheap toy projector, made of red and gold tin. I coveted it. Again and again,my father and my brother would explain to me that this object of my desireswas nothing compared with the serious grown-up instrument we had at home, butI refused to be convinced; the lure of the trashy redness was stronger thanany persuasion they could offer. Then my father would ask me, "What would youprefer, a shining golden penny or a dirty gray sixpence? I was tormented bythe question, I could feel it had a catch to it, but I would always settle forthe gleaming penny.

    One afternoon, I was taken to Bumpus, a bookshop in Oxford Street, to see aperformance for children on a nineteenth-century toy theater. This was myfirst theatrical experience, and to this day it remains not only the mostvivid but also the most real. Everything was made of cardboard: on thecardboard proscenium, Victorian notables leaned stiffly forward in theirpainted boxes; under the footlights in the orchestra pit a conductor, baton inhand, was suspended for eternity preparing to attack the first note. Nothingmoved; then all of a sudden the red and yellow picture of a tasseled curtainslid upward and The Miller and His Men was under way. I saw a lakemade of parallel rows of blue cardboard with wavy lines and wavy edges; in thefar distance the tiny cardboard figure of a man in a boat, rocking slightly,passed through the painted water from one side to another, and when hereturned in the opposite direction he seemed closer and bigger, for each timehe was pushed into the wings by a long wire, he was invisibly replaced by alarger version of himself, until in the final entrance, the same figure wasfully two inches tall. Now he was out of the boat with a menacing pistol inhand, and he slid magnificently to center stage. This grand entrance, worthyof a leading man, was absolute reality, as was the moment when hidden handswhipped away a mill with sails that really turned and a summer sky, blue withfleecy white clouds, and in their place dropped a lurid picture of the samemill in apocalyptic explosion, with fragments bursting from its orange core.Here was a world far more convincing than the one I knew outside.

    Childhood is happily literal; thinking in metaphors has not yet begun tocomplicate the world. Even if one never asks oneself, "What is real?,"childhood is a constant wandering back and forth across the borders ofreality. Then, as one grows up, one either learns to distrust the imaginationor else one comes to dislike the everyday and seek refuge in the unreal. I wasto discover that the imaginary is both positive and negative--it opens on to atreacherous field, where truths are often hard to distinguish from illusionsand where both throw shadows. I had to learn that what we call living is anattempt to read the shadows, betrayed at every turn by what we so easilyassume to be real.

Lying in my bed with the sort of fever that makes the sheets rough and the dayinterminable, I would hear noises from the floor below and interpret them asthe grinding of the Earth Submarine, from the comic I read every week. I wasconvinced that at any moment it would bore its way through the floor, and itsrakish captain would invite me to join him in a new and perilous undergroundadventure. My dialogue was all ready, but he never came, so I would return tomy true fetish, two precious rolls of professional cinema film that I hadfound in some dump. I would hold them up to the light, framed between twofingers, making them come to life with tiny jerks of the wrist. One was tintedgreen, and it showed two men in silhouette on a roof, while the other inpinkish red showed a figure slowly opening a door. Each time a new story wouldemerge from these fragments of action, and I happily discovered that thepossibilities were inexhaustible. Cinema and theater seemed made to help oneto go "somewhere else."

At the big radio exhibition, a crowd had gathered around a box, watching agray and grainy image on a tiny glass screen. I pushed my way to the front tosee this great new invention called television. The miniature picture showeda man drawing a gun. At once I was swept inside the screen; the crowds, theexhibition hall, all vanished, and nothing mattered anymore. I was part of thestory, only interested to know what happened next, experiencing for the firsttime how quickly an illusion can grab hold of us, how easily our substancedissolves and we disappear into the unreal.

    Another time, my mother and I slipped to our seats in a little Swissmountain cinema at the moment when the trailer for the next week's film was onthe screen. Here, too, the picture showed a man with a gun, but this time itwas pressed against a girl's head, just visible on a pillow in the dark. "Woist der Schlussel der Garage?" he was murmuring. To this day, I hear thisphrase and it gives me the same shudder. "Where is the key to the garage?" Aquarter of a century later Brecht explained to me how important it was for himto prevent an audience from identifying with what happens on the stage. Forthis he had invented a whole series of devices such as placards, slogans, andvery bright lights to keep the spectator at a safe distance. I listened to himpolitely but remained unconvinced. Identification is far more subtle andsubversive than he seemed to imply. A television screen is bright, and whilewe know in our bones that it is a box and we are in our own room, nonethelessif a finger is rightly raised we identify with it. A gun, a clenched fist, andthe illusion is complete. Where is the key to the garage?

    The movies were my real windows on another world. I rarely went to a playand if I did so, it was reluctantly, dragged off by my artistically mindedmother while my father would say with a wink, "We're not highbrow, you and me,we like films." Once inside the theater, I was usually fascinated, but it wasneither the story nor the acting but the doors and the wings that captured myimagination. Where did they lead? What lay behind? One day, the curtain roseand the set was not just the three walls of a drawing room. It was the deck ofa ship, of a real ocean liner, and it was inconceivable that such a splendidvessel could end abruptly in the wings. I had to know what corridors led awayfrom those thick iron doors and what was out there beyond the portholes. If itwas not the sea, it had to be the unknown.

Every day, to go to school, I would take the London Underground; the Tube, atrain as cylindrical as its name, would nose its way through round tunnels andin each station, on every platform, there were doors marked NO ENTRY. Ievolved wild fantasies round these entrances, convinced they hid obscurelabyrinths that led to a world below the city, and I longed to turn the handleof the forbidden iron doors, just to peer within. I could never pluck up thecourage to do so, but I always had the intimation that just behind the walllay another world, accessible, rich with mystery, full of wonder--which couldlead to another and still another until it reached a last one that wascompletely invisible. On half-days from school, I bicycled into the countryand would lie on the ground, trying to hear the breathing of the earth. Iwanted to thrust myself into nature, so I pressed on the rocks as though theywere doorbells, in the hope that some primitive power, some unheard-ofcreature would answer my call. One day, as I lay contented in the long grass,a sudden question arose from nowhere and grasped me by the throat. "What if atthis moment you are as close as you will ever be to the truth? What if therest of life will be a gradual moving away from what you are now?"

Attractive girls, podgy girls sweating and unappetizing, young men in bowlerhats and striped trousers reading the financial pages of their newspapers--myeye as a fascinated sixteen-year-old would pass to and fro across the row offigures in the Underground train. Each time it came to rest on an older personlooking vacantly into nowhere, an intimate voice would murmur in my ear a lineof T. S. Eliot's that I had learned at school: "In the halt between stations,the mental emptiness deepens," and the same questions would recur: "Why isgrowing up a decline? Do the shoulders have to stoop with passing time, doesthe excitement have to wane? Is this part of nature's plan, this slowslipping-down toward the grave?"

    I would walk along the street looking at my fellow humans with a sense ofwonder I have never lost, asking myself, "What are these creatures? How oddthey look!" I would see the faces without recognition, as we imagine Martians,just balls of flesh, slitted and potted with curious bumps and holes, and Iwould stare, as though momentarily endowed with the eyes of the future, at theabsurdity and ugliness of the motorized boxes of armor wheeling these peopleup and down the street.

    I read books of science, not so much because I liked facts and measurementsbut because I was captivated by the ideas they aroused. In those days, awriter called James Dunne was making a great stir with books on Time, and as Idevoured them, it seemed to me that all life's questions were finallyresolved. Eternity, he wrote, is the keyboard of a piano, and Time is the handthat strikes the notes. The explanation seemed flawless, both elegant andcomplete.

    Walking along Charing Cross Road one day, peering into the windows of thebookshops, my eye had been caught by a fat volume on display. On its cover inlarge letters was printed the magic word Magick. At first I wasashamed at my interest and several times would enter the shop and pretend torummage on other shelves before furtively turning its pages. Suddenly, afootnote caught my attention: "A pupil who reaches the grade of MagisterPrimus can produce wealth and beautiful women. He can also call up armed menat will." This was irresistible, and although the book was far too expensivefor me, I bought it and at once set out to trace the author, whose very name,Aleister Crowley, was notorious enough to produce a thrill of excitement andfear. A letter to the publisher produced a phone number, which led to anappointment at an address in Piccadilly, where gentlemen-about-town lived inexpensive service flats. The great magician was elderly, green-tweeded, andcourteous. He had been known in the twenties as "The Wickedest Man in theWorld," but I think he was down on his luck. He seemed touched by my interest,and we met a few times, strolling along Piccadilly together where to my greatembarrassment he would stand in the middle of the traffic at noon to raise hiselaborately carved walking stick and chant an invocation to the sun. Once hetook me into the Piccadilly Hotel for lunch, and again in the crowded andstartled dining room, he roared out a conjuration across the soup. Later heallowed me to hide him in my bedroom in Oxford so that I could make asensation by producing him at the height of a college party, and on the sameoccasion he outraged a waiter at the Randolph Hotel who asked him for his roomnumber by bellowing, "The number of the Great Beast, of course--666!"

    When I did my first production in London, Doctor Faustus, he agreedto be magical adviser and came to a rehearsal, having first made me promisethat no one should know who he was, as he just wanted to watch unseen from theback of the stalls. But when Faustus began his incantation, it was too muchfor him and he was on his feet, roaring impressively, "No! No, no! You need abowl of bull's blood. That'll bring real spirits, I promise you!" Then headded with a broad wink, "Even at a matinee." He had demystified himself, andwe laughed together.

    What dominated my early years was alternately a natural skepticism and adelight in mockery, and on another level, a longing for belief. At school,Scripture had been taught by a Mr. Habershon. He wore a clerical collar andhad a trick of rubbing his face with both hands so that it looked as though hehad scraped away a layer of skin, leaving the whole face corrugated and red. Ihad learned as a child that I was Jewish and Russian, but these words wereabstract concepts to me; my impressions were deeply conditioned by England: ahouse was an English house, a tree was an English tree, a river was an Englishriver. Our school chapel was a place where we sniggered from boredom, yet attimes it glowed with secret ardor, so when the age came for us all to becandidates for confirmation, I went to Mr. Habershon, confused, shamefaced,wanting so much to be taken by him on his special religious journey yetpainfully embarrassed at the thought that I was opening my heart to the buttof our jokes and fearful that I might be forced to mention God in our liberal,scientifically minded home. Mr. Habershon sat there, rubbing his face:"There's a time in life when you know without question 'This is the moment.'If you let it pass, it will never come again." He rubbed his face again, as ifit were a crystal ball in which he could read the truth. I wasn't quite clearwhich moment he was referring to, but I went through with the ceremony ofconfirmation. His phrase has haunted me ever since. Can one ever know "This isthe moment"? I still wonder and shudder at the thought that I might have letit pass, that I am letting it pass again.

    At Oxford each morning, there was a very precious moment of solitude when Iwould pass through a gate that led to a private path which ran beside theriver. It was thickly overgrown, but the sun, when it shone, illuminated everytwig, bringing into sharp relief each complex tangle of branch, stem, andleaf. When I walked there, I would revel in these inexhaustible patterns, forthe details moved and rearranged themselves with every step I took, and Iwould go slower and slower, even rocking forward, then backward, to shake thedetails of the kaleidoscope and enjoy more and more intense glimpses into theever-changing atoms of perception. I would become aware that a sigh wasarising in me from some deep unknown source and that the sense of beauty wasinseparable from a special sadness, as though the aesthetic experience was areminder of a paradise lost, creating an aspiration--but toward what I couldnot say.

    Many years later, experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, I swallowed apill made from the Mexican mushroom and at first was disappointed not to enterinto a world of extraordinary visions. Then to my surprise, it awoke aninfinite sensibility just in the point of my index finger. This time, myperception of detail through touch was so rich and full that I felt I wouldwillingly surrender all my other senses, accepting to be both deaf and blind,if only touch were left, for that tiny point was universe enough. Had Ipenetrated to the heart of the fleeting moment?

Continues...

Excerpted from Threads of Timeby Peter Brook Copyright © 1999 by Peter Brook. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582430187
• ISBN 13: 9781582430188
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240