São Paulo (Fulsapress) – Peter Brook, one of the most influential theater directors of the 20th century, died Saturday (2) at the age of 97.
An experienced artist in opera, film and theater criticism, he has chaired institutions such as the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and the Royal Shakespeare Theater in the UK.
Brooke has also taken his work to countries on the African continent and the Middle East, where he has produced a variety of improvised pieces, both original and distinguished with a challenging approach.
His concept of “empty space,” reinforced in the title of his 1968 book, influenced later generations by advocating a greater rapprochement between theatrical performance and the audience, revolutionizing what filmmakers understood through theater. The idea was to strip the montage of everything that might be considered superfluous to highlight what is being staged per se.
His version of Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was popular, for example, in which the actors walked on stilts and dangled from a hammock. One of his most famous and amazing works was the ‘Mahabharata’, a nine-hour epic of Hindu mythology created in 1985 and adapted into the movie in 1989.
The artist lived in Paris for 50 years. There he founded and directed the International Center for Theater Research.
Born in London in 1925 to Jewish-Lithuanian immigrant parents, his first production took place at the age of 17 and he spent most of his career directing plays at the Parisian theater Les Bouffes du Nord, considered since the 1990s a historical monument by the French government.
Brooke left the direction of the corporation in 2010, at the age of 85, but has continued to sign on to production. In 2019, he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize for the Arts in Spain, as “Master of Generations”.
