"The spirit, this immaterial matter impossible to justify and to show, is the only justification for the theatrical event", has always said Peter Brook, one of the greatest figures on the international theater scene, and today
he disappears at 97 years old
(he was born March 21, 1925), with all the richness of his work, the most mythical.
It would be enough to remember his '
Marat-Sade
' by Weiss in the mid-60s and then the colossal '
Mahabarata
', a show for Avignon in 1985 which later became a film and recently a graphic novel.
"The tightrope is the image that best represents my idea of theater", he declared, adding "I don't want to teach anything, I'm not a teacher, I have no theories".
For him, the important thing has always been the impression, to trigger the imagination, which the freer it is, the more essential and strong the starting point is.
Brook has always been committed to being able to make every artifice disappear on the scene, to make sure that the diaphragm between life and art was overcome, practically nullifying the concept of fiction in the face of the revelation of a profound existential truth.
Thus with him the theater became an intimate collective experience of life, because "when a group of people is gathered for a very intense event, which must express everything that a great author can give in poetry,
The theater has been in Brook's life since he was a boy
, if he signed his first direction at 18 and therefore stands out as an interpreter of Shakespeare's works, so much so that he became, first, director of London's Royal Opera House and, in 1962, by the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he combines the classics with a series of modern works and experimental works inspired in particular by Artaud's 'theater of cruelty', such as a famous 'Marat-Sade' by Peter Weiss and 'Us' work that he referred to the violence of the Vietnam War.
