Peter Brook: "The rest is silence"

Peter Brook, in a wheelchair, on Friday night on the Lliure stage.

Exciting, exceptional, unrepeatable event tonight at the Lliure de Montjuïc as part of the Grec festival program.

Moments before the premiere of his

his version of the Shakespeare classic, the British director Peter Brook, 96, a living history of the world theater, took the stage and taught an extraordinary lesson in his art from his wheelchair. , ending it with the final words of dying Hamlet: "

, the rest is silence.

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It has been something that has put a lump in the throat, impossible to imagine anything more moving.

A kind of testament thrown from the place that has been Brook's homeland, the scene.

The audience has risen to enthusiastically applaud the director's lesson, twenty minutes of considerations on the theater surrounded by the actors of the show.

Peter Brook began with humor saying that he had forgotten Spanish and that he learned French because they told him that it was the lingua franca to understand everyone, although later, he said with a wink to the public, he understood that the important thing was Catalan , and apologized for not having learned it. He recalled “wonderful experiences in Barcelona, ​​to which I have often come and then go to the Costa Brava, Palamós, Palafrugell and Tamariu where with my wife Natasha (Parry, who died in 2015 at the age of 84), we had a small apartment of a room". Brook asked if anyone from Tamariu was in the room.

"Now we are going to talk about the real issue," continued the director, to whom the members of the company were translating his speech. Brook then referred to two concepts, two words that, he said, especially move him, resonance and shock. He has exemplified these ideas with a series of phrases from Shakespeare's plays, after remembering that the good actor, “the true actor”, is “the one who does not allow himself to be carried away by the ego and makes the words resonate in him so that everyone we can share them ”. You have spoken of words that have a special mystery such as

, somewhere, or

, need;

and phrases like the famous Danish prince "words, words, words."

It has been asked with the Bard and his Juliet "what does a name represent?"

and he has reminded them that a rose, whatever theirs, preserves its aroma.

He has continued to say beautiful things.

He has accompanied Othello to Desdemona's camera to analyze his great phrase, "p

a repetition in which turning off the light acquires two completely different meanings, he stressed: the jealous Moor turns off the candle in his hand and then extinguishes the light of the life of his wife whom he believes to be unfaithful.

Brook has blown out the imaginary candle of life in his hand.

Then he referred to Lear's sad phrase, the five terrible repetitions of "

r", never, before the body of his daughter Cordelia. And he recalled how important it is to find a minute in life to tell those we love everything that we have left to say. And he has finished with the immense phrase of Hamlet behind which there can be nothing. Getting one last miracle of the night: the rest, after a round of huge applause, was not silence, but the representation of that wonder that is

. The wizard left us in the hands of another wizard.