Peter Brook and a Handful of Hamlets

Margaret Croyden, Conversations with Peter Brook, 1970–2000. New York: Faber and Faber, 2003; Andy Lavender,Hamlet in Pieces: Shakespeare Reworked by Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson. New York: Continuum, 2001.

Last spring I saw Peter Brook's production, Tierno Bokar. As usual, I was struck by the clarity of the luminous performances, the simplicity of the staging, the importance of community, the telling of stories that reflect on what it is to be human, the honoring of death and the dead. The stories, like the staging, were relatively simple and very engaging, but tried to get to the heart of how to live. Brook's characters are always trying to figure out how to live on the right path; there's a spiritual quest (and usually a journey) going on, without the promise of a particular god. Tierno Bokar learns there is "your truth, my truth, and the truth," which leaves the impression of wisdom, without providing an explicit answer. While several people I know were underwhelmed by Tierno Bokar, I found it tremendously moving and eloquent, both deliberate and light. The marvelous transparency that Brook's actors have always had was once again apparent, and this African Muslim tale felt as universal as we in the West like to think Shakespeare is.

In the Anglo-American theatre world, Brook is the most broadly acknowledged master theatre director left, although the apparent simplicity of his "style" (of his actors' performances, of his staging) make it challenging to imitate or to transmit to future generations. His work is addressed extensively in both of the books under consideration here. Now in his eighties, Brook continues to work with his often remarkable company, because, as he tells Margaret Croydon, he has to: like so many artists, he doesn't have a pension plan. "I have to earn my living, so I go on working. I have no pension . . . . It's a practical thing."

While Croydon's book, a compilation of interviews and conversations with Brook spanning 30 years, focuses on him exclusively, Andy Lavender's study is a more theoretical and systematically analytical examination of three major directors' approaches, as exemplified in their stagings of the same classic play, Hamlet. Along with Brook, Lavender looks at the work of the auteur directors Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage. Both of these directors, while producing a broad range of work, are stylists who emphasize the power of visual images. Their work can be described as postmodern in its decentering of the text and the slipperiness of significance in the stage images, and in the heightened artifice of the performance style (more so in Wilson than in Lepage). In contrast, Brook's work is ultimately humanist and strives for universality in an age when that ambition could be deemed old-fashioned or even willfully unsophisticated. His search for universal forms and the fundamental gesture in African villages or in Iranian mountains has been criticized as residual colonialism (much as Grotowski's similar efforts were), because of his reading of these elements through a Western, rather than culturally specific, point of view.

The current emphasis on multiculturalism, however, has led to some odd collaborations. In recent years the influential Wilson extended his work to address African-Americans and Christianity in his collaboration with Sweet Honey and the Rock in The Temptation of St. Anthony at BAM and Indonesian origin myths in I La Galigo at the Lincoln Center Festival. For Flaubert's text, he characteristically created elaborate and spectacular images, moving people around more or less abstractly, but with overall less resonance than in previous works. The most memorable and moving moment was an old man slowly making his way diagonally across the stage as he sang a song a cappella. Recalling it now, the image of the old man, the weariness of his solitary journey, reminds me of the gravity and isolation in Brook's film of Lear...