PETER BROOK, AN ICONOCLASTIC CREATOR
Peter Brook is regarded as one of the most daring and original voices in 20th-century theatre. Although his first professional love was film, after staging Marlow's Doctor Faustus whilst a student at Oxford, he was captivated by the stage.
His productions are noted for their iconoclastic nature and he is without a doubt the best respected and most visionary contemporary British theatre director.
Over the course of his career, Peter Brook has also excelled in many other different artistic arenas, including, opera, cinema and literature.
His greatest works have been his stagings of the works of Shakespeare, his work with the Theatre of Cruelty which led to Marat/Sade (1964), and his staging of The Mahabharata (1985). Brook later successfully turned all these works into films.
His films include the sad, pessimistic fable The Lord of the Flies, adapted from William Golding's book of the same name; Meetings with Remarkable Men, based on the book by the Armenian philosopher and mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who made a great impression on Brook; and his adaptation of Marguerite Duras's Moderato Cantabile.
Peter Stephen Paul Brook (London, 1925) studied at Westminster, Gresham's School and Oxford. He made his directing debut in 1945 at the age of 20 at the Birmingham Rep after being discovered by Barry Jackson. Between 1947 and 1950 he was director of productions at the Royal Opera House. In the 1950s he worked on many productions in Europe and the United States, and in 1962 he returned to Stratford-upon-Avon to join the recently set-up Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). In the 1960s he directed a large number of RSC productions and in 1970 he set up the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris, of which he remains director.
In collaboration with the French Institute and the British Council.
Brook par Brook Simon Brook (France)
Lord of the Flies Peter Brook (Great Britain)
Marat/Sade Peter Brook (Great Britain)
Meetings with Remarkable Men Peter Brook (Great Britain)
Moderato Cantabile Peter Brook (France / Italy)
Tell Me Lies Peter Brook (Great Britain / USA)
The Mahabharata Peter Brook (Great Britain / France/ Belgium/ Austria)
The Tragedy of Hamlet Peter Brook (Great Britain / France/ Japan)