| Synopsis: |
Peter Brook is, without doubt, the contemporary theatre's greatest inventor. With a lifetime of work, he has held audiences spellbound with his critically acclaimed productions. In this memoir, which moves freely back and forth between time and key personal events, Brook writes an account of the most significant moments in his life.Born in 1925 in London, at twenty-one, Brook became the enfant terrible of British theatre, directing major post-war productions of Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, opera at Covent Garden and new plays in London's West End. But, as he reveals here, his first love was the cinema and his career has always included the making of films alongside the making of theatre and opera.In 1964, Brook produced Peter Weiss's The Marat/ Sade for the Royal Shakespeare Company and his whole approach to theatre became radicalised. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Brook began relentlessly to explore the roots of non-Western theatre, which once again changed his view of what theatre could be for actors and audiences. His journey took him to Paris where eventually he founded a company at the Bouffes du Nord theatre.In this autobiography, Peter Brook not only unfolds the many threads of his ever-changing artistic fortunes, but also the different strands of an intimate quest for meaning. |