Peter Brook, in Paris, on January 25, 2011. Jacques Brinon (AP)
Peter Brook - who died this Sunday at the age of 97 - has been a man of the theater with the appearance of a centenary tree in which the solidity and serenity of nature and the freshness of the sap that sprouts with surprise each spring accumulate. of a new life that will once again offer new flowers, new leaves and new fruits.
A tree sustained by the two best poetics of European theater: roots anchored in Russian culture and theater, where his family came from, and a trunk that grew to become solid and powerful in British culture and theater, where he grew up and he lived many years.
Two countries where the theater was and continues to be useful and necessary for its inhabitants.
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Peter Brook, the theater giant of our time, dies at 97
A Jew, furthermore, he always avoided settling on a particular land, as his soul avoided it and as his theater always avoided it.
His place was always the world, his spectator, the human being, wherever he came from.
Like the actors in it.
The immense and protective foliage of it learned and lived with all the breezes and storms, from the coldest southern ones to the warmest of the different northern parts of our globe.
And all of this was in his theatre, which was always offered to us with generosity and a very, very apparent simplicity, in reality the fruit of study and reflection and work such as only authentic humanism of the highest quality achieves when, through an alchemy inexplicable, applies to art, in his case to the theater.
And like all great humanists, he spoke little and listened a lot.
We are lucky that many of his thoughts, not theories, he left in writing.
When one reads his books, one gets the impression that everything is obvious, that he is not inventing anything, that he expresses the feeling that all men and women of the theater seek every day, but that we do not know how to express.
That is when the "revelation" occurs, the moment in which we managed to understand in ourselves something that we all carry inside, in a way that is too tangled and that he, lightly, with a breath of fresh and new air that came from his lungs. , miraculously not rarefied, managed to make the flame move without going out, that the fire remained acquiring new forms and colors each time.
If he had to endure something, he who exercised the exercise of doubt with intelligence and constant militancy, was one of our vices in the face of the talent of others: the mystification attributed to him by many, turning him into a guru possessing infallible truths, something that he himself accepted with resignation, but deeply detested.
Like all great artists practicing our craft, he tossed more things in the bin than he kept.
I have never met another director more relentless when it comes to cutting a show, the fruit of many months, sometimes years of work, before and even after offering it to the public.
To the chagrin of his own actors and surely of himself.
I have seen him reduce a four-hour show in one afternoon and leave it at an hour and a half.
So that he would never infiltrate what he defined as the worst "demon" capable of attacking the theater and that can sneak in at any time: boredom.
And since I have spoken of flame and fire, I want to end with a beautiful oriental story that he told me at one of the tables in the humble restaurant of the Les Bouffes du Nord theater, his Parisian refuge, tables shared by actors and spectators, before or after a function: In a Hindu monastery, lost in the middle of the bush, some monks lived, among them one whose voice nobody knew.
He had never heard her speak before, and they all credited her with the deepest wisdom and the greatest knowledge.
When he was at death's door,
the other monks asked him to speak so they could know that truth that he had never spoken.
The old monk uttered only one word: "Fire."
And at that moment the monastery burned.
That has always been, for me, the theater of Peter Brook.
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