The creative method of Peter Brook (three "Storms")

Bondarenko Arina Sergeevna Postgraduate student; Russian Institute of Theater Arts - GITIS 119072, Russia, Moscow, Yakimanka district, Serafimovich str., 2 arinabond9@gmail.com

Introduction

A huge body of materials has been written about Peter Brook's theater in Russian and foreign criticism. Theater critic Elena Khaichenko speaks convincingly about the actual significance of his philosophy of "living" and "inanimate theater" using the example of modern English productions of the last decade, which suggests that Peter Brook's work is still important for scientists ^[1]. However, the play that accompanied the director throughout his creative career helped to sum up the multidirectional search for the essence of the theater, which he himself treated with special trepidation and was never sure that he understood it completely, little attention was devoted. We are talking about William Shakespeare's The Tempest, to which Brooke referred several times, considering it as an inexhaustible source of meaning.

The author of this article sets out to consistently review the performances of The Tempest, which form an independent cycle in the director's work. The three stage versions that are the subject of the study, arranged in chronological order, will allow us to trace the evolution of Peter Brook's directorial techniques: his ways of working with the playwright's text, space and actors. The peculiarities of Peter Brook's artistic language have become the subject of research. The main research methods were chosen: historical and cultural, which allows us to consider productions in the context of time, and the method of theatrical analysis of performances.

A significant contribution to the development of the topic of this article was made by theater critic Igor Ratsky, who, in an article on the stage history of Shakespeare's last play in England and Russia, described the first performance based on Peter Brook's The Tempest, in the context of the director's development of the idea of freedom and power ^[2].

The outstanding Shakespeare scholar Alexei Bartoshevich mentioned the second "Tempest" by the English director ^{[3, p.57]}. We also find the most valuable information about the reasons for the evolution of Peter Brook's directorial method, the properties of his creative manner, and the phenomenon of simplicity in his later performances in the director's portrait of Alexei Bartoshevich ^{[4, p.123]}.

Reviews and articles by English and French critics published in periodicals and various collections have been of great help in this study. Among the authors, it is necessary to single out those who studied the work of Peter Brook, for example, John Truin, Michael Custow, George Banya, Albert Hunt, Margaret Croyden and other researchers. In most cases, the reflections of foreign authors are descriptive, so some of the answers about how the performances were made were found in books and articles by Peter Brook himself.

The Tempest of 1957. Between the visual and the acting image

In the mid-1950s, Peter Brook saw the stage as a place to create illusions. He did not seek to destroy the ramp line in order to achieve direct contact with the public. The audience played the role of those who spy on the actor's art from the darkness of the hall, and the director was concerned about the visual aspects of the theater, which he explored by staging Shakespeare's plays ^{[5, p.34]}.

The significance of "The Tempest" in 1957 partly lies in the fact that the director managed to combine two principles of performance design in the space of one performance, highlighted by English critics at that time: the furnishing detail, originating from Charles Keen, and the ascetic conventionality, which was a feature of the style of Fyodor Komissarzhevsky and Gordon Craig ^{[6, pp.204-205]}. This was facilitated by the free genre nature of the play itself, the organic coexistence of the motives of reality and dream-illusion. "The Tempest" is perhaps the only work by Shakespeare where there is no category of predestination: what the characters should be, how they should be played, how everything will end for them, how many endings Prospero will come up with for his abusers, using the possibilities of magic – this opened up certain possibilities in the sense of combining techniques.

On the one hand, Brooke inherits the idea of Craig, who believed that the director was the sole author of the play ^{[7, p.196]}. The director creates the costumes, sets, and music design himself. The space became a concise metaphor that expressed the structural dominant in the system of images of the entire play, and was executed in an ascetic manner: the bare cliffs of North Cornwall, hanging vines, a shaky bowsprit swinging like a giant pendulum that stopped at the finale, a lantern describing an arc over the dark proscenium and hiding in the wings on the other side of the stage – the image of a ship and a deserted island. The musical accompaniment using the so-called "concrete music" composed by Brooke was not suitable for performing songs, as it was a mixture of sounds from orchestral bells, a Malay nasal flute, the thunder of an iron leaf and the strangled singing of a tortured Sistine Chapel chorister ^[8]. Critics had such an impression of the music because the director had compiled the score for the play using tape recordings of sounds and actors' voices ^{[9, p.102]}. The counterpoint of spatial and musical solutions created the feeling of an island that is "full of sounds."

Also, the director does not refuse to recreate the entertainment of the play and shows himself to be a subtle connoisseur of the traditions of the past, he encrusts signs of the transformed presence of the Victorian style into the new performance. For example, his Ariel appears on a lift resembling a huge mushroom, and then increases or decreases in volume, depending on the angle of incidence of light ^[8]. The effects of sunset and dawn over the island were reminiscent of Turner's painting, there were also huge static paintings in a wedding mask, with the participation of goddesses and shepherdesses – all These tricks were loved by the Victorians, and Brooke gave only a peculiar memory of them ^[10].

Critics considered Brooke to be a master of stylization: he designed costumes inspired by the manner, color scheme and texture of materials from famous painters: Watteau – "The Fruitless Efforts of Love" (1950), Brueghel – "Measure for Measure" (1950), El Greco "The Tempest" (1957). It may seem that the director was in thrall to decorativeness. Kenneth Tainen then wrote about the end of the era of the word: "The time is coming when the eye's instant reaction to a visual image will become paramount and it will be possible to say more with them than with phrases" ^{[11, p.171]}. An important clarification needs to be made here. Brooke actually pursues a different goal, he does not create images for the sake of direct "picturesqueness" or to set off the actor's capabilities, as was the case with the Victorians. Brooke uses set design, costumes, and music to create "moving patterns" within which actors exist. It is important for Brooke that the viewer perceive the visual image as a bridge, referring to possible meanings hidden inside the text, associations from the stage past that arise in the viewer's memory, and the direct musical sound of Shakespeare's phrase, which the actor embodies in the present. It creates a field of surface tension between the outline of the external expression and the internal content of the text.

Brooke, unlike Craig, believed that the visual and auditory image of the play expresses only the horizontal plan of Shakespearean drama. It was important for him to alternate the rhythms of rhymed and blank verse, revealing the metaphysical plane of poetry. The director argued that the manner of reading poetry is dictated by the properties of the material, comprehended rationally rather than intuitively ^{[12, p.268]}. In order to break through to the essence of the phrase, it was necessary to abandon the cliches of the melodic proclamation of the 1940s: the routine of a sublime romantic tone, statuesque poses and meaningful pauses.

In Brooke's theatrical system, the main place was still occupied by the actor's personality. Therefore, the director built a centripetal mise en scene, all points of which converge on the figure of John Gielgud, who played Prospero. The actor recalled: "In Brooke's production, I played Prospero as a hermit in the spirit of El Greco, with short-cropped hair. I was naked to the waist and with bare legs. Brooke felt that in the last act Prospero was returning to his duchy as a kind of god" ^{[13, p.94]}. Even from the appearance of Prospero, as played by Gielgud, one can understand that Brooke was interested in the active nature of the character. Gielgud's merit as an actor was that he boldly abandoned the role of the noble father, the image of the aging duke, as he was played back in the early twentieth century, and the plasticity of his acting gift, his truly proteistic mobility, allowed him to unobtrusively show the depth of the image.

Kenneth Tainen wrote that Gielgud looked like a strict ascetic scribe who lives a blessed life of mind, his face reflected emotions and pain. The look was full of thought. The voice was similar to the sound of a cello and woodwind instruments ^[8]. Another critic wrote about the subtle psychological development of the role of Prospero by the actor. The words became a sign of passion. Prospero-Gielgud fought a single battle for his soul. The actor's skill lay in the fact that he turned the narrative into a concise internal action, combining past anger and control achieved in the moment, which led him to a rarer action – the refusal of revenge and the opportunity to forgive enemies ^{[14, p.25]}. However, the climax was ahead. The refined sophistication and inner nobility inherent in Gielgud's acting style have not gone away, but they have acquired a different quality, they were colored by the expression of choice.

The discovery of the essence of the final monologue, hidden by Shakespeare in one stanza, gave Brooke the key to the image of Prospero. This image gained such significance for Brooke because in it the mind, soul and body must coexist at the same time. This is the law of organic human wholeness, which can be found at the moment of choice. For the director, the play is a philosophical category of negation of time as such, it is the past that is born in the present. The past is a character. The present is an actor making a choice that should be perceived much more broadly than the acting task, without connecting personal human understanding, born from an attitude to the present, presence in the moment, a choice is impossible ^{[15, p.203]}. The final monologue becomes the point of choice.

My ending is despair

The rest of my life is despair.,

Unless it be relieved by prayer

If it is not lightened by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Which is so penetrating that it attacks

Mercy itself and frees all faults

Mercy itself frees you from all wrongdoing.

As you from crimes would pardon'd be

Since all your crimes will be forgiven.,

Let your indulgence set me free

I ask for your indulgence so that you will give me freedom ^{[16, p.11-12]}.

In one stanza, Shakespeare combines three concepts: prayer, mercy, and attack. Brooke comes to a paradoxical conclusion: Shakespeare's character needs a prayer of piercing power that can attack mercy. Prospero asks for the Creator's indulgence towards his creation. ^{[17, c.97-98]}.

Forgiveness, mercy and condescension show the effective nature of the human will and require mental efforts, including from the audience. The actor's task becomes as difficult as possible at this point. Brooke laid bare the structural formula of Shakespearean catharsis, which can be experienced collectively, but the strength of the inner action and the distribution of tension depends on the actor. Brooke writes about the importance of musical phrasing for Shakespeare. The poet begins with an afterthought, despair, and then increases his expression and guides the viewer and the hero through a series of extremely abstract concepts. These words form a cascade of emotionally complex transitions within the end-to-end action of the monologue: prayer attacks mercy, mercy is achieved through leniency, and forgiveness of crimes grants freedom.

Thus, in the first version of Brooke's The Tempest, one can see a step-by-step ascent to a holistic understanding of the text, through the perception of its parts, through a musical, scenic image, and in the center of the hermeneutic circle (the term hermeneutic circle was proposed by the philosopher F. By Schleiermacher) of course, there is an actor who becomes a full-fledged co-author of the playwright and director.

"The Storm" in 1968. An experiment in the spirit of the times

In 1968, Peter Brook turned to The Tempest again and staged it at the Round House Theater in London with a group of actors who were participants in his Center for Theatrical Studies, organized in Paris at the suggestion of Jeanne-Louis Barraud. The second version of the play appeared at a landmark moment for a world gripped by conflict and student riots. At that time, the United States bombed the provinces of Vietnam, and the youth had a cult of the romanticized hero, the Argentine revolutionary in a black beret, Ernesto Che Guevara. ^{[18, p.20]} The Times newspaper published photographs of victims of the conflict in Saigon. Images of violence, blood, and murder have become so firmly embedded in the daily lives of people who follow the news that Hollywood producers have received permission to lift censorship restrictions on the depiction of violent scenes in movies. Peter Brook makes a kind of afterword to his play "US" (1966), the film "Lie to Me" (1968). It was made in a pseudo-documentary manner and devoted to the topic of young people's reflection on the Vietnam conflict, and a fictional discussion with leading political scientists and politicians was shown in a parodic Brechtian manner.

The director witnessed how Parisian students expel Jean-Louis Barraud from the Odeon Theater and call for an end to "bourgeois" art. Barro, who staged absurdist dramaturgy, hosted student troupes in his theater and suddenly realized that he belonged to the generation of the 1920s and realized what an aging "beatnik" he seemed to those who listened to Bob Dylan and proclaimed freedom of sexual relations ^{[19, p.311]}.

Peter Brook, who by this time had experienced a fascination with political theater and the philosophy of Artaud's "theater of cruelty" and applied these ideas in the grotesque play "Marat Sad" (1966), felt the fragility of all trends in art and did not join any of them, explaining his choice as follows: "I never believed in the uniqueness of the truth.. Neither his own, nor someone else's. I believe that every school, every theory can be useful in a certain place at a certain time" ^{[5, p.23]}. Brooke thinks in a procedural way, the essence of the work for him is the property of the present, it is checked at the moment of rehearsals. For her laboratory studies of acting capabilities, Brooke revisits Shakespeare's latest play.

Now the text of the play was less than 500 lines in prose. The plot was completely deconstructed, compressed and turned into a collage of actor's sketches based on the play. Themes of cruelty, violence, hidden sexuality, love at first sight, the ship of fools, the seven deadly sins, and attempted murder served as the basis for plastic improvisations ^{[20, pp.137-138]}.

This time in The Tempest, the director was interested in events disguised by the playwright, which trigger a series of actions of the characters: conspiracy, seduction, murder, violence ^{[15, p.154]}. From Brooke's point of view, exposing the plot of the play, one can understand that the storm is only a provocative pretext for Shakespeare, but in fact he is interested in the mechanisms of human nature. For such a directorial task, the etude method was suitable, which made it possible to retell the play in his own words and show the author's initial impulse with the help of pantomime ^{[21, p.69]}.

For example, the performance opened with a sketch of the actors with a mirror ^{[22, p.126]}, which they first played out among themselves, accompanying the movement with various animal sounds, howling, whispering and shouting. Then the actors turned to the audience and showed masks created by straining their facial muscles, which were supposed to be associated in the minds of the audience with the seven deadly sins, as well as with the real social situation – the sinking crew of the ship. Accordingly, fear became a common emotion for all, to which the viewer could easily connect on an unconscious level, expressed in a grimace. In this performance, Brooke sought to find the maximum number of meanings for the same situation, which were played out non-verbally, as in the case of the first scene. Ariel and Caliban parodied Miranda and Ferdinand's love scene in a homosexual version.

The main task of this performance for Brooke was to rally and liberate the acting ensemble, to create a community. Therefore, most of the mise-en-scene in the play were of a mass nature. For example, the director divided the actors into two groups, depicting living and dead sailors who also built pyramids of bodies. In this desire to erase the individual principle in the interpretation of images, one can notice another tendency to create a "Total personality", as Artaud tried to define it ^{[23, p.54]}. The idea is to abandon personal subjectivity and move towards impersonal objectivity. However, for Brooke, this idea was hardly connected with Nietzsche's ideas about the superman, the destruction of personality under the yoke of everyday life and the transition to mass consciousness. Rather, it was a signal of the plight of all mankind, and an attempt to overcome the crisis of the tragic artist. In other words, Brooke always believed in the creative power of art and the best in man, without sentimentality, but denied the uniqueness of truth, of any philosophy.

The performance was played on small wooden platforms located on the outside of the circular area and on scaffolding that moved during the performance. The action was simultaneous: one of the scenes was played on each site, and the viewer could freely move around the hall and choose an episode to watch. The performance was accompanied by the sounds of percussion and drums. One of the scenes was organized in this way: Caliban appeared at the top of the scaffolding and jumped out from under the feet of his mother Sycorax (imitation of the act of birth), then his linguistics lesson with Prospero began. At the word "slave," Caliban flew into a rage, jumped down from the platform, running away from Prospero, moved to another tier of scaffolding, where he raped Miranda, after which the actor was thrown down through a hole between the scaffolding. At this time, a group of actors portraying the choir made a sarcastic comment on what was happening: "How beautiful a man is." After Caliban's escape from captivity, Sycorax staged an orgy – a group of actors portrayed sexual poses in the form of tableaux vivants ^{[20, p.140]}. In this unique acting experience, the dark sides of human nature were explored, felt at the level of instincts. The harmonization and resolution of the motifs touched upon in this version of The Tempest came to Brooke after the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1970.

The "Storm" of 1990. To the playhouse

In 1990, Peter Brook directed The Tempest at the Bouffe du Nord Theater in Paris. At this time, his style changed once again, reaching simplicity. It consisted in the apparent gradual disappearance of form, the use of natural textures, colors and everyday objects, which, when crossing the sacred space of the stage, lost their utilitarian purpose and became an artistic image. In fact, Brooke came to lay bare Shakespeare's multilevel "stage-world" formula. Therefore, he assembled an international team of actors. The ensemble consisted of those who had worked with the director since the founding of the Center for Theater Studies – Yoshi Oida (Gonzalo) and Bruce Myers (Trinculo), as well as guests Sotigu Kuayate (Prospero), David Bennett (Caliban), Bakari Sangare (Ariel) and others. Brooke, unlike many modern directors, was not tempted to reduce the ideas of the play to adapt it to the tastes of the public. For example, he never considered "The Tempest" as a play about the dangers of colonialism. This approach became popular in theatre after Jonathan Miller's production at the Mermaid Theatre in London in 1970.

For Brooke, the third appeal to the play was related to the desire to continue the dialogue about the mutual enrichment of cultures, which he and Ariana Mnushkina had begun back in the 1980s ^{[24, p.352]}. It was important for the director to create a space where any image was freed from cultural layers and associations, and the actor could touch the invisible world of spirits. In this sense, the choice of an actor for the main role of Prospero (Sotigu Cuayate) is significant. The moment of renunciation of magic as a talent and a part of inner strength was close and understandable to him, since the belief in the presence of spirits and magic was part of the culture of the Griots ^[25]. As everyone knows, in a year's time Peter Greenaway will use the reverse gear and make the film "The Books of Prospero", which is completely built as a picturesque mystery from images of old culture.

Peter Brook immersed himself with interest in the naive playful nature of the theater: "a play is a series of games and charades that help to comprehend the light of life," Brook noted ^[26]. Before approaching the play, the director needed to achieve the unity of the ensemble, so that each actor felt his partner at the level of intuition, rapid reactions, gaze, body movements and thoughts. One word or phrase of Shakespeare could start a stream of vocal and plastic improvisations of playing with an object, which were picked up by a partner ^{[27, pp.107-108]}. As always, procedure was important to Brooke, but the result he was striving for can be accurately described using the thesis of director Mikhail Butkevich, who argued that beauty in the theater is improvisational, and an actor on stage is beautiful when he creates in front of the audience, an "addressable" moment of playing beauty that exists only here and there. now ^{[28, pp.635-636]}.

There was an empty space on the stage that Brooke loved, in the middle was a rectangle marked with bamboo poles, and in the corner was a rough stone. The critic Georges Banu wrote that the simplicity of the stage space organization (the artist is Chloe Obolensky) reminded him of the image of a Zen dry garden in Kyoto, a garden where nature is limited by stone and sand to become a metaphor for the cosmos ^{[29, p.234]}. As you know, in such a garden, all the elements represented by pebbles, sand or stone symbolize parts of the natural landscape: mountains, rivers, waterfalls ^{[30, p.40]}. The stage space was surrounded on three sides by spectators sitting in the stalls, as in the Globus Theater.

During this period, Brooke continued to explore the relationship between sound and motion. This problem was especially troubling to him during his work on the play Orgast, when he was looking for a way to combine the structure of the ritual elements of Zoroastrianism with the theater.

In the third "Tempest", the director deliberately refused to develop psychological roles, did not consider the actor's body as a receptacle of sexual impulses. The actor's movements were associated with the manifestation of the effective nature of creativity, and the quality that Brooke defined as "effortless transparency" ^{[31, p.217]}, providing an organic presence beyond the control of reason. From Brooke's point of view, the body has an intuitive intelligence that helps involuntary movement take shape. In this regard, the actor's body became a universal instrument, a carrier of the possibilities of total theater. The small space suggested minimalistic mise en scene with few movements, so their accuracy increased. Ariel Bakari Sangare possessed the virtuoso grace and plasticity of a circus performer, which contrasted with his impressive physique. He appeared in silence, lightly removed a stick from his head, which made a rustling sound, made a strange gurgling sound in his voice, and, spinning in a dance, began to assemble the mast and bow of a sinking ship from sticks ^[26]. Thus, the actor became an instant creator of the Storm. Brook completely gave the opportunity to create a magical illusion to the performers. In another scene, the nobleman Gonzalo (Yoshi Oida) depicted a scene in the ocean. He held it horizontally in front of him, showing the surface of the ocean. He lifted it to his shoulders, then to his chin, looked at it warily, lifted it over his head: his hero was overwhelmed by a wave and he was drowning ^{[20, p.269]}.

The final monologue of Prospero (Sotigu Kuayate) was solved simply: the actor walked across an empty stage, took off his magic cloak, sat down on a stone and modestly and casually uttered the last words ^{[32, p.7]}. The actor used the technique of playing with an object as with a partner in order to recreate the natural theater of Prospero, and the improvisational way of existence of the actors allowed to consider the play as a game that unfolds simultaneously in the planes of different cultures, of which the actors are the bearers, the performance reaches the scale of a parable. For Brooke, theater, created in an empty space with an actor seeking balance within physical action, became a form of being, that is, it became equal to reality.

The last "Tempest" is significant because it showed the scope of Brooke's directorial powers. He is no longer interested in actors who fall into the type, fit into the norms of conventional beauty, develop roles and characters using various techniques and approaches to acting. Brooke is not obsessed with the idea of educating his actor, like many directors of the twentieth century. In established masters, he discovers the potential of an improvisational actor ^[33]. Brooke sees the actor as a bearer of mystery, a harbinger of the invisible. He is interested in those who, having passed the stage of breaking with the author, and having overcome the usual forms of theater, were able to reach their sensitive primary images, and with the help of improvisation create a performance in the present.

Conclusion

Thus, three performances of one play clearly demonstrate the line of evolution of the director's approach to the last play by William Shakespeare. The first appeal was related to the theater of visual images and the discovery of the metaphysical nature of Shakespeare's text, refracted through the individuality of the actor, who becomes a co-author of the director and the playwright. Next, Brooke uses the motives of the play to explore human nature and acting capabilities through a sketchy method. The third version of the play exposes Shakespeare's formula of the world as a theater, where different techniques and cultural traditions intersect, allowing to create a sense of naive theater and the immediacy of the game.

At the same time, it is the comparison of performances based on "The Tempest" that makes it possible to discover the property of Brooke's directorial manner, which can be defined by the word diversity. In his theater, there is no need to look for a system of techniques framed in a strict method, since the director himself claimed that he did not have a single method of working on a play: he proceeds from a "formless premonition," that is, a sense of the direction of the playwright's thought, empty space as an opportunity to start all over again, based on the characteristics of the actor's creative personality ^{[15, p. 26]}. The last performance also allowed Brook to confirm the idea that total theater, as a combination of all the possibilities of this art form, is primarily contained in the actor's body.

The article is published in its final version as approved following the last positive peer review recommending acceptance for publication. It incorporates revisions made by the author in response to prior negative peer review reports that did not recommend publication. All peer review reports, including initial negative reviews, are published in open access alongside the article. All versions of the author’s revisions are archived in the publisher’s repository and may be made available upon reasonable request in accordance with Elsevier’s editorial policies and applicable data availability requirements.
Read all reviews on this article