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For theatre to survive, the world needs more directors like Peter Brook. Peter Brook is one of contemporary theatres greatest inventors. He is unique in comparison to other modern directors as he searches for ‘the thing itself before it has been made anything.’ From the late 1950s through the 1960s, Brook repeatedly described himself as ‘searching’ and ‘experimenting.’ This experimental phase of his career, with its questions about audience and abstraction, eventually led Brook to abandon commercial theatre for the International Centre of Theatre Research (CIRT). CIRT is a workshop he founded in Paris in 1970, it continues today and is non-commercial. It is evident from reviews and remarks of respected theatre goers across the globe that Brook’s style is refreshing, interesting and a little strange. Sir Barry Jackson called Brook ‘the youngest earthquake I’ve known,’ and many others have described him as a surprisingly forceful person with a style to match. At the beginning of his production of The Brothers Karamazov in 1946, the theatre grew dark until even the exit lights went out, and suddenly a gunshot rang out. He shocked audiences three years later in his production of Dark of the Moon when he staged a witch hanging upside down from the proscenium arch. There was also a scene that Kenneth Tynan remembered as ‘one of the most exciting events I had ever witnessed on the stage.’ Brook was unique in his time and became well known for surprise endings in his plays. What is the point of producing theatre if it is all the same? This director did plays with flamboyant dramaturgy, graceful words, and faraway, incredible locations. During the 1940s, he found British theatre as colourless as wartime and post-war Britain, and he saw there a ‘great gap between good material and indifferent achievement.’ As a result, he was selected to direct by ‘shaping, turning, shifting actors and materials in a certain direction, a new direction.’ When I first started work,’ he has recalled, ‘what seemed to me most important was that the result should be alive.’ His reputation for ‘ingenious’ directing grew until, as one actress said, ‘No one could mention Peter without prefixing the word ‘clever’ to his name, and in an odd way, it trivialized all his work.’ To call a director great, unique and one of a kind: you must look exactly at what they have done. For Peter Brook there is no need to look far, as classical drama has been greatly affected by the director.
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