"The Formless Hunch": An Interview with Peter Brook

"The Formless Hunch": An Interview with Peter Brook DANIEL LABEILLE Peter Brookwas in Stratford-upen-Avon in August, 1978, todirectAnronyandCleopatra for the Royal Shakespeare Company. As 1 was in England doing research on both Brook's and Strehler's productions of King Lear, I took advantage of this coincidence to interview Brook about the Lear rehearsal process. This interview became an extensive digression into some of Brook's present ideas on directing. D. L. In rereading a lot of material recently on how your Stratford production of King Lear evolved, I noted that it was mentioned several times that you were strongly influenced by Beckettian images.... P.B. Who said I was? D.L. Several of the critics who subsequently wrote of that production suggest that Jan Kott's article on " King Lear or Endgame" had a direct bearing. ... P.B. Yes ... But who said that that's correct? D.L. That's one of the things I had hoped to discuss at greater length today. P.B. (laughs) ... Well, you've come a bit late, and I don't know if I can recall the details of that production. You see, in a sense I am very uninterested in the past, but totally uninterested, and as far as I'm concerned this really is what the whole of theatre is about. Things come and go and, in fact, all the work that we've been doing now, for instance with the Paris group for seven years, is based entirely on the uniqueness of the performance. So that, though we do plays for a run, as well as other things, all our improvisations, the interesting things, are never repeated. There are really marvellous things that happen once, seen by a tiny group of people in a hostel, or by factory workers in suburbs, and they vanish without a trace. We had a most astounding improvisation in agirls' school in a new satellite town outside Paris one morning and it was the best improvisation we've ever done. It's gone without a trace and this is the essence of our work. Even Ubu now, we've just been in South America and each performance is really different from the next, completely readapted to all sorts of things. As I say, it's in the past, but I do rememberthat one of the things that 222 DANIEL LABEILLE absurdity of Gloucester leaping on the stage is like a Beckett play. But when you begin to say we do it in the style of a Beckett play, it's almost like saying Beckett wrote Shakespeare! In The Empty Space I say that both Beckett and Brecht are incorporated in Shakespeare and that, though they are great figures of our time, they are but minute figures compared to Shakespeare. In the same way, if you look at very great Renaissance paintings, sometimes you will find, behind the central action, a comer which is just trees vaguely painted in the distance, and because ofthe vast command ofpainting technique available to that painter, that comer, ifyou could cut it out and frame it, is like a great impressionist painting which would be enough to make the reputation of a nineteenth century painter. In the same way, the universe of Beckett, though in our times unique because of its quality and intensity, is still very much less than the human range of the whole Shakespearean cycle. Beckett would be the last person to take offence at that, because it's self-evident. It's like saying someone who is five-foot-six isn't six feet. It's a fact and, in exactly the same way as Beckett, Brecht is a very interesting and influential man of the theatre in our times; because there haven't been all that many. So, he too is a major figure, but he disappears completely compared to Shakespeare. D .L. Several years back, in an interview with Denis Bablet for Travail ThNitral, you spoke at some length about the rehearsal process, stating that both the term "rehearsal" and its French equivalent, "repetition," were misnomers , since it was, in fact, a period ofpreparation ratherthan repetition. And you made an analogy to...