(ANSA) - ROME, 03 JUL - "The spirit, this immaterial matter impossible to justify and to show, is the only justification for the theatrical event", Peter Brook, one of the greatest figures of the international theatrical scene, has always affirmed, and today it disappears at 97 (he was born on 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 from 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.
Brooksi is always 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 definition in the face of the revelation of a deep 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,
Theater has been in Brook's life ever since he was a boy, if he signed his first direction at the age of 18 and therefore became famous as an interpreter of Shakespeare's works, so much so that he became, first, director of London's Royal Opera House and, in 1962, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he combines classical works 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' which referred to the violence of war in Vietnam.
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