Director, actor and writer Peter Brook has died at the age of 97, his entourage announced on Sunday.
The theater master, born in Great Britain but who spent a large part of his career in France, at the head of his Parisian theater Les Bouffes du Nord, had reinvented the art of staging by favoring refined forms. instead of traditional decorations.
It was at the end of the 1960s, after dozens of successes, including numerous plays by Shakespeare, and after having directed the greatest - from Laurence Olivier to Orson Welles - that he decided to settle in France where he begins his experimental period marked by the theory of “empty space”.
It is also in this country that he stages monumental pieces nourished by exoticism and with actors from different cultures.
His best-known play is "The Mahabharata", a nine-hour epic of Hindu mythology (1985), adapted to the cinema in 1989. In the 90s, when he triumphed in the United Kingdom with "Oh les beaux jours" by Samuel Beckett, critics hail him as “the best director London doesn't have”.
After an adventure of more than 35 years at the Bouffes du Nord, Peter Brook left the management of the theater in 2010, at the age of 85, while continuing to stage productions there, until recently.