The party is over, and Peter Brook, like the spirits in
The Tempest
, has dissolved into air, thin air.
Worth, paraphrased, the words of the great magician Prospero in William Shakespeare's twilight play to fire another great magician, this one from the scene, who leaves us this Sunday at the age of 97, the newspaper
Le Monde
has reported , creating a bleak void around it.
After the death of Peter Brook, as when Prince Hamlet died, the rest can only be silence.
Renovator of the scene, unrepeatable giant of the theater of our time, which in his case extends from the middle of the 20th century until now, as he continued to stage productions, Brook is now as synonymous with dramatic art as Shakespeare himself, whose work it was one of the beacons of his life and of which he offered unforgettable rereadings.
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British theater director Peter Brook, Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts
Everything was overwhelmingly wonderful and exceptional in Brook, from the marathon performances of his unforgettable
Mahabharata
(1987), the version of the Hindu epic poem that he staged with as much epicness as the original in what constitutes one of the milestones of world theater of all time. , and that we were able to enjoy in Spain until the little introductory talk he offered just a year ago at the Teatre Lliure in Barcelona when he went on stage, already in a wheelchair, to present his show
Tempest project,
his version of Shakespeare's classic.
Among his most remembered creations, the stagings of Shakespeare, of course,
Lear, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, A Midsummer Night's Dream
, or his staging of Peter Weiss's
Marat / Sade
in 1964.
Writer of several essays that are of reference in the scenic art, such as the landmark
The Empty Space,
film director, humanist and Renaissance man, with a strong character, interested in the Russian writer George Gurdjieff, from whom he adapted his
Encounters with Remarkable Men
, He was a cosmopolitan who traveled the world collecting material from other cultures for his creations.
Born in London in 1925, Brook, who was director of the Royal Opera House and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he directed a large number of productions, had been living in France since the 1970s (he had worked with Jean-Louis Barrault), where he founded his famous Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris, a mecca for experimentation and theatrical excellence, where he developed his art for half a century.
His works include works by Chekhov, Genet and Beckett, operas, creations from non-theatrical texts, such as the works of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, or taken from the African world, including small and simple stories from the popular world raised by his wand to the category of theatrical goldsmith jewelry.