From Brain to Mind

Peter Brook, Je suis un phénomène, Bouffes du Nord, Paris, March 24-May 30, 1998.

Je suis un phénomène, which was premiered in Paris in late March 1998, is the third of what looks and feels like a minimalist trio, even if Peter Brook did not conceive of it formally in this way. The first of the troika is L'Homme qui (The Man Who, 1993), described accurately by Gautam Das-gupta as "a beautifully orchestrated chamber piece for four actors" (see PAJ 52). It was followed in the 1996-97 winter season by Beckett's Happy Days, Natasha Parry's elegant, though robust, Winnie offset superbly by François Berté's Monsieur Hulot-like Willie. Berté's sudden appearance towards the end of Winnie's monologue comes as a jolt, so accustomed have we become to the solo image of a woman up to her neck in sand.

Happy Days is a stoic's allegory of survival when life sucks you in. The Man Who, based on Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, is a funny-wistful, poetic quartet on the tricky turns of the brain by which sufferers of neurological disorders take their weirdest images, utterances, and actions to be normal. In Je suis un phénomène, Brook goes from the performances of the brain to the performativity of the mind, to an exploration of what the mind does--how it images and creates--as it exercises and re-establishes memory. Brain system, mind action, and life survival--these are the motifs that connect the three productions together, whether survival is through the mind (like Winnie's mind over matter) or irrespective of mind (the case of Solomon Shereshevsky in Je suis, who is ultimately handicapped by his prodigious memory). The productions are equally remarkable for their clear, sparse delivery of lines as well as gestures. It may be appropriate to claim for a director, who lays such great store by the materialization of thought in practice (that is, "theory" which is not intellectualized, but emprically tested) that Brook's 1995-96 Qui est là, which is composed of fragments from Hamlet as well as Artaud, Brecht, Craig, Meyer-hold, Stanislavsky, and Zeami, is a metatext reflecting upon the art of doing that is acting. As such, it is a metatextual, conceptual commentary on the way the other three productions are directed and performed. Qui est là, then--in my view a laboratory piece rather than artifact--throws into relief the interest of the trio as Brook's newest stage, or port of call, of his lifelong research on the theatre.

The text of Je suis un phénomène is by Marie-Hélène Etienne and Brook, and closely follows Une prodigieuse mémoire, the French translation of Aleksandr Luria's study of Shereshevsky during the 1930s. Luria, a celebrated Soviet neuropsychologist who died in 1977, supported the idea of a "romantic science," by which he meant a biographical rather than purely analytical approach to personality. Etienne and Brook emulate his intimate tone and, above all, his capacity to give scientific material the quality of imaginary, dramaturgical writing (something that influenced Sacks's stories, as can be gleaned from the preface by Sacks to Luria's book). ¹ Their text also takes the most important sequences of Luria's meetings with Shereshevsky. There are near-verbatim reproductions of She-reshevsky's words as he explains how he remembered hosts of mathematical tables by reading them in every dimension--vertically, horizontally, and diagonally; or how he was able to repeat, in a language that he had never learned, the opening stanza of Dante's Inferno; or how his synesthesia generated a profusion of tropes, sensations, and associations through which he con-figured multiple meanings, all gathered at speed and packed in dense layers, which he unpacked in the telling.

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