'Great Directors at Work'

by Kirk Woodward 

[Kirk, who, ROTters will know, is a longtime friend, has been a prolific contributor to Rick On Theater since its inception in 2009.  He’s written on many topics, mostly theatrical and musical (but not exclusively), and since one of his many talents is as a director, a number of his ROT posts have been about directors and directing.

[Kirk’s directorial articles for this blog include “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” 4 June 2010; “Directing Twelfth Night for Children,” 16 and 19 December 2010; “Saints of the Theater,” 30 December 2011; “Reflections On Directing,” 11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013; “Evaluating A Director,” 1 March 2017; “Thoughts On Rehearsals,” 26 December 2017; “George Abbott,” 14 October 2018; “On Directing Shakespeare,” 1 March 2019; “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With,” 25 June 2019; “The Producer and the Play,” 20 July 2023; and “A Directing Experience,” 13 and 16 October 2023.

[It goes without saying—but I will anyway—that many of Kirk’s other theater posts, in particular, his performance reports, also draw on his directorial experience.  All told, Kirk’s contributions to ROT number something over a hundred.

[Kirk’s current post, “Great Directors at Work,” is a report on the book of that title by David Richard Jones.  It’s a run-down, according to Jones’s lights, of the directorial careers and techniques of four prominent stage directors: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht, Elia Kazan, and Peter Brook.  As significant as this book is—I’ve had a copy in my library for many years—Jones isn’t all that well known.  I couldn’t even find his birth year listed anywhere.

[David Richard Jones is professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, where he also taught courses in the Department of Theatre and Dance.  He taught Shakespeare as well as modern and contemporary drama at UNM since 1971.  He’s also devised educational programs involving humanities lecturers and booklets for high school teachers at professional theaters in New York and New Mexico.

[Jones was the founding artistic director of the Vortex Theatre in Albuquerque (1976-78); Vortex, a purveyor of classic contemporary, and cutting-edge theater, is Albuquerque’s oldest continuously-running black box playhouse.  He was also the founding artistic director of Will Power, the Vortex Theatre’s summer Shakespeare repertory launched in 2010, and of the New Mexico Shakespeare Festival in 2014 and 2015. 

[Also a freelance theater director who’s directed over 50 productions of classics, contemporary plays, musicals, and operas in English and Spanish, including productions in Mexico and Venezuela, Jones’s directing experience includes professional, community, and educational productions of many Shakespeare plays, including three versions of Hamlet, two of As You Like It, plus King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, and Much Ado About Nothing.

[In addition to Great Directors at Work (University of California Press, 1986), Jones is the editor of New Mexico Plays (University of New Mexico Press, 1989), an anthology of then-recent original dramas by New Mexican playwrights.  It presents a contemporary vision of the modern New Mexican landscape in plays by native New Mexican dramatists (plus one 20-year transplant) that all take place in New Mexico and are about subjects and characters New Mexicans might know.

[When Kirk observed, “Some productions today . . . seem to be more about the director than the playwright,” he added that “Jones does not decry this situation.”  This suggests that Jones put great store in directorial “independence and power,” which can be seen, perhaps, in the descriptions of some of his Shakespearean productions.  From the pages of the Weekly Alibi, a news, arts, culture, and entertainment newspaper and website in Albuquerque:

The Vortex Theatre’s version of the play [King Lear (2008)] takes place against the backdrop of World War II.

The Vortex version of Much Ado About Nothing [2010] is set in the Roaring ’20s.  Think flappers, bon vivants, martinis, cigarettes and lawn games.  Think The Great Gatsby.

Jones’s production [of Hamlet (2016)] incorporates modern props and dress in order to “eliminate a layer of interference between the audience and the play” and this is done holistically.  Cell phones, for example, are incorporated not as an afterthought, but as an essential vehicle to pushing the plot forward, potentially rife with meaning.

[Those notices were generally mixed: some of Jones’s directorial choices worked for the reviewers and some didn’t.  That’s about par, I’d say.]

At the conclusion of a production of Antigone by the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles (c. 497/6-406/5) about which I have written elsewhere in this blog (“A Directing Experience,” posted on Rick On Theater on 13 and 16 October), the cast gave me, as associate director, a book called Great Directors at Work, presumably not because I am one, but in order to help me become one.

In any case I have found the book to be of unusual interest. Published in 1986, its author is David Richard Jones, now professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, who has taught both English and Theatre Arts there. (It’s published by the University of California Press.)

Jones wrote his book while the prestige of the field of directing was on an upswing that continues to this day:

I am inclined to accept the historical fact that directors have become central to modern theatre and then to consider a corollary, that modern theatre is no doubt more sophisticated and more artistic for that change.

Since he wrote that sentence, directors have become even more central to the theatrical experience, certainly in the United States. Jones revels in that fact:

Today’s personally expressive, independently creative directors testify to the historic reality of this drive for imaginative freedom, that is, to the most self-consciously artistic impulses within the ranks.

Some productions today – even of plays written long ago – seem to be more about the director than the playwright. [For what I consider an example of this, see my report on Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie as staged by Sam Gold, posted on 8 April 2017. ~Rick] Jones does not decry this situation:

At least in the United States, it seems that the director has moved a desk into the playwright’s workroom, the better to channel inspiration from the beginning.

So “directorial authority” comes down to independence and power.

If sufficiently old-fashioned (like myself), one can argue that on the contrary “the play’s the thing,” and the Dramatists Guild would agree (sometimes in court), claiming that a director’s primary function is to make sure the author’s work itself is faithfully presented. Jones demurs:

How can a director be said to create if the assignment is merely to stage someone else’s play? That is not creating to a very meaningful degree, is it?

Jones relates the idea of “power directors” and their work to other issues:

We disagree in a muddled way about whether directing is an art, about what the art consists of, about what its kinds or “isms” might be, about its vocabulary, and about much more that is equally important to a sophisticated treatment of the subject.

For example, he pleads for a more robust vocabulary to describe a director’s work – for a better definition of “director” itself, for a canon of examples of directing that can serve as models, for precision in the use of words like “style,” “image,” and “presence.” He offers suggestions for some of these, but primarily he is more concerned that we understand that directing today is “an activity that no longer depends on preexistent literature.” He feels this is for the better:

I am inclined to accept the historical fact that directors have become central to modern theatre and then to consider a corollary, that modern theatre is no doubt more sophisticated and more artistic for that change.

With the courage of his convictions, he claims that

1880-1980 is the third great age of Western drama, an era comparable or superior to the eras of Sophocles and Shakespeare in such respects as duration, number of productions, cultural reverberation, and artistic achievement.

For me, sneaking in the words “artistic achievement” in the above quotation is begging the question. However, Jones sees the history of directing as progress:

So “directorial authority” comes down to independence and power. The independence I describe is not only from script or collaboration, but just as importantly from dead traditions and bad habits, from rotten cliches, stale thoughts, and poor assumptions about what theatrical art can or cannot be.

Perhaps. To objections, Jones says that he’s talking about the present situation, and that if we don’t like it, we should change it – which of course is easier said than done. In any case, I found much of the material in this book to be a revelation, because its “main event” is a stimulating discussion of four productions by four directors: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht, Elia Kazan, and Peter Brook.

One problem with such a discussion is that theater is an ephemeral art. Some aspects of it can be captured with video recording, but by its nature such recording is selective – it can’t include every aspect of a theatrical performance.  Jones avoids this difficulty by centering his work on his four directors’ written examinations of the plays they stage (also utilizing reviews, journals, and other artifacts).

What in the book was revelatory for me, then? In the case of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938 – Jones’ spelling of his name), the production Jones chooses to write about is the famous Moscow Art Theatre’s production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) in 1898. This production established the MAT as one of the leading theaters in Russia (and subsequently in the world).

I assumed this Seagull presentation was a Stanislavsky production. In fact he directed fewer than half the rehearsals for the play. Equally surprising, he spent a month and a half in isolation working out a detailed plan for the production. What’s surprising about that?

Today, at least in the United States, Stanislavsky’s name is associated with mental acting work, in particular the technique of emotional recall promoted by Lee Strasberg (1901-1982) at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. Stanislavsky certainly focused on similar work during much of his career.

However, in his rehearsal plan for The Seagull, Stanislavsky focused almost entirely on physical actions, to a level of detail hard to believe, except that we’ve got the written notes to prove it. For example, at the beginning of Act 3 of the play:

Jumping to his feet, he runs to Miss Arkadina; speaks boldly, forcefully, confidently. Turning round to him, Miss Arkadina looks straight into his eyes. She has understood everything. A pause. She shakes her head. Trigorin deflates completely, says in a faltering, imploring voice, ‘Let’s, please’ and sits down on a chair despondently.

Almost any actors could follow these instructions and give decent renderings of their roles, without any inner life. More precisely, “inner life” would inevitably follow as a result of these “external” instructions. Over his career Stanislavsky moved between the two poles of the internal and the external.

At the end of his life he was still exploring the effect of the physical on the emotional. Many actors shy away from this kind of work because they are afraid the results will be cliched and superficial, and certainly that’s a danger if the physical work itself is cliched and superficial. However, as Stanislavsky demonstrated, it doesn’t have to be.

Here are two personal experiences along this line. I studied acting for several years at the HB Studio in New York with Elizabeth Dillon (see “Portrait of a Mentor” by Alan Geller, posted on ROT on 30 July 2020), wonderful teacher who was thoroughly conversant with Stanislavsky’s approach(es) as she had learned them from Bobby Lewis, Stella Adler, and Uta Hagen. I brought a scene into class and I was absolutely awful in it.

Giving instructions for a repeat of the scene, she said to me, “Darling, all I want you to do is . . .” and she gave me a series of physical instructions – on this line cross to the desk, on this word pick up a pencil, and so on. When we did the scene again it worked like a charm.

Somewhat similarly, a few years ago in New York I directed a two-character one act play. One of the actors took to his part immediately and was able to take detailed character notes. The other could not “get” his role at all. So, remembering Elizabeth’s advice, I gave him physical instructions for every moment of his role. He immediately played it exactly the way I felt the playwright had intended.

To see Stanislavsky working this same way is fascinating. The use of what is sometimes called a “score of physical actions” is by no means his total approach, but it is important, and seeing his thoroughness in preparing his “score” for The Seagull is inspirational (see “Ryszard Cieślak,” 5 February 2020, and “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973),” 19 November 2021; also briefly, “‘The Stone in the Soup’ – Excerpts: Part 2” by Tom Crawley, 17 April 2011 – all descriptions of an actor using a score). It encourages me to prepare more diligently in my own directing work.

On, then, to Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), well known for his plays (including Mother Courage and Her Children, first performed in 1941), his theory of the “alienation effect” (as it is often translated in English), and his thoroughgoing Marxist orientation. (For comments on Brecht’s concept and the translation of the name, see “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations: Verfremdungseffekt,” 4 July 2010.)

Jones, referring primarily to Brecht’s production of Mother Courage in Berlin in 1949, uses as his text an enormous “model book” that Brecht created for that production, called Couragemodell 1949. Brecht’s idea was to make as complete as possible an account (including the script, numerous notes, and abundant photographs) of a successful production that other directors could follow.

Whether the model book has ever been used in that way in productions beyond Brecht’s own company (the Berliner Ensemble) is not clear to me. However, it is a remarkable resource for learning about how Brecht worked, and Jones’ account of it clarifies many aspects of Brecht’s work.

In the first place, he makes it clear that whatever Brecht’s theories of theater may have been at a given time (like Stanislavsky, he was given to clarifying, expanding, or just plain changing his ideas as he felt necessary), as a director he did not promote his theories in front of his casts. He discouraged discussion in rehearsal. “Brecht would say that he wanted no discussions in rehearsal – it would have to be tried,” wrote the director Carl Weber (1925-2016), who worked with him.

What Brecht did instead of promoting ideas is fascinating: he worked in extreme detail (as did Stanislavsky on The Seagull) and he focused that detail on individual moments in the play, avoiding generalizing, and shaping each moment of the play as if nothing followed it,

freezing a motion or condition; stopping the action for a closer, longer look; isolating a detail or moment or element or shading and then expanding it into meaning, into an image.

One of Brecht’s co-workers said that Brecht achieved his results by accumulation of “a large number of details, some of them very small.” Obviously this approach takes a great deal of time to prepare a play, and Brecht knew this, writing in the model book that

The pace at rehearsals should be slow, if only to make it possible to work out details; determining the pace of the production is another matter and should come later.

Jones says that there is actually little in the model book about the pacing of the entire play, certainly no indication of whether it should be “slow” or “fast” at any point. It should be true, Brecht insisted, conforming to the reality of the moment and also reflecting (as was second nature for Brecht) its social meaning.

Meaning conveyed through specific detail was fundamental to Brecht’s theatrical art, and he insisted on it from his earliest days as a director. . . . He placed one thing after another until a final conclusion was obvious.

In other words, Brecht deeply embodied his ideas in behavior. “Without details there are no ‘concepts’ in  Brecht’s theatre, no themes, no broad intellectual perspectives or messages,” Jones writes. I and others have often referred to productions as “Brechtian” without understanding Brecht's approach, and I am grateful to Jones for clarifying this point, and a great deal more.

Because Jones’ book is so full of worthwhile information, I will not go into equal detail about the last two directors he covers in his book, Elia Kazan (1909-2003) and Peter Brook (1925-2022). However, it is worth noting that all four of the directors discussed in the book are workers of astonishing thoroughness, all highly intentional in their work.

Elia Kazan was the acknowledged leader in direction on Broadway beginning with his work with the Group Theatre in the 1930s and moving through the next two decades, until he abandoned the theater for movies.  Kazan was a director with energy and confidence:

. . . he was always his own director, always his own man. In his words, “I work on the premise that the audience will like to see what I like to make.” From the mid-1940s until the early 1960s, no American theatre director could point to a more distinguished career as justification for such artistic self-assertion.

Kazan describes his working method in three steps:

1.  “I put terrific stress on what the person wants and why he wants it. What makes it meaningful for him. I don’t start on how he goes about getting it until I get him wanting it.

2.  Introduce the actor to “the circumstances under which he behaves – what happens before, and so on.”

3.  “I will say nothing to an actor that cannot be translated directly into action.” “The life of a play is in behavior.” “I try to find the physical behavior without preconception on my part if possible, but from what the actor does to achieve his objective under the circumstances.”

One notices that, although Kazan’s tone is firm, he leaves room for what the actor brings to the role. Directors may be tempted to think that the actor can do nothing without them. Kazan did not make this mistake.

The material of my profession is the lives the actors have lived up to now.

At the same time his preparation is thorough:

Kazan has said that directing is “half conceptual, the core of it – you get into what the events mean, what you’re trying to express,” and half executive, “just work. But if you are careless with the first stage, you make something which is flaccid at its center.”

Jones uses the first production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) to examine how Kazan worked, and the story is thrilling. It includes tensions among actors, close and careful work with the author, and self-confidence when everyone around the play doubted its success.

Kazan was particularly known for the energy his productions displayed. The critic Eric Bentley (1916-2020), who had major reservations about Kazan’s work, wrote:

Things move fast in a Kazan show. So fast you can’t see them. If anything is wrong, you don’t notice. If a false note is struck, its sound is at once covered by others. One has no time to think. “Drama isn’t time to think” the director seems to be saying, “it’s action that sweeps you off your feet.”

However, Jones makes it clear that while Kazan was committed to the use of powerful strokes in his productions, he didn’t make a fetish of them, realizing that they had to be grounded in the script itself:

I tried to think and feel like the author so that the play would be in the scale and in the mood, in the tempo and feeling of each writer. I tried to be the author.

Jones recounts times where Kazan literally “tried to be the author,” particularly with the plays of Tennessee Williams that he directed, but he denied that his intention was anything beyond putting on stage what the author had in mind – in a memorable phrase, “turning Psychology into Behavior.” In his late novel The Under-study (1975) one of his characters puts it this way:

The great plays were not great because of cleverness. Today it’s all experiments in style. What counts and what endures is meaning, theme. What you have to touch in an audience is their fundamental concerns, what’s worrying them now and always will, even if they don’t know it, the mind’s despair, the heart’s hope.

In the beginning of this article I noted Jones’ enthusiasm about the idea of the director as the primary artist of the theater. In Kazan’s work we can see a certain weakening of the playwright’s claim to be the major source of inspiration of a production. Peter Brook (1925-2022), Jones’ fourth and last subject, is a major director whose relationship to “texts” is even more fluid.

The play that Jones uses to illustrate this point is Brook’s famous Royal Shakespeare Company production of the 1963 play by Peter Weiss (1916-1982) entitled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, usually and mercifully referred to as Marat/Sade.

(I almost wish Jones had used Brook’s famous 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I saw first in London and then in the United States. Brook set the play in a box-like set and used circus techniques as the physical “language” of the play. It was I suppose the greatest production I’ve ever seen; it was dazzling but it never lost sight of Shakespeare’s play.)

Brook’s Marat/Sade began its life as a workshop on the subject of madness. A workshop, Jones says, is “a form of research,” frequently inspired by “a widespread dissatisfaction . . . with realistic acting and dramaturgy.” Jones suggests that the questions posed by Brook’s and similar workshops are:

How could Western theatre rediscover an expressive style beyond realistic portrayal of behavior?

How could the actor’s whole human mechanism be liberated to achieve this new expressiveness?

How could theatre distinguish itself from the more popular and automatic dramatic media?

How could actors and directors relate to the audience?

The ultimate goal of such workshops could be said to be “a theatre of sound of movement,” which, note, is not necessarily the same as “a theater of plays.” The relationship of performance to text, the proponents of the workshop approach posited, was something to explore – as the director and workshop leader Charles Marowitz (1934-2014) wrote, “as material that could be reworked and rethought” –  and not something to take for granted.

Brook said that his rehearsals had two parts, “looking for meaning and then making it meaningful” – again, to create content and then to apply it to a play. The process is strenuous; Brook’s workshop for Marat/Sade led the great actress Glenda Jackson (1936-2023), then at the early point of her career, to say that “we were all convinced that we were going mad.”

The resulting production was dazzling, validating Brook’s approach at least for the play he was working on.  Brook’s was not the only approach; other productions around the world took different approaches, again suggesting the idea that the “text” of the play was just that, a framework to be filled with content.

One should note that Brook’s work was never experimental in the sense of being tentative or vague. Brook began as a “conventional” director, and Jones stresses that he knew all the tricks:

For Brook, the problems of variety and pace were great opportunities. He has always preferred contrasts to similarities and jangles to chords, and he has theorized that variety is a necessary or structural element in modernist theater. . . . Brook’s career offers many proofs of his contention that pace is the “one god whom we all serve – whether in musicals or in melodramas or in the classics.”

But it was his determination to recreate the theatrical experience from the bottom up – to start completely anew every time, every production – that made him an icon in theater circles. The “workshop” was a fundamental instrument in his attempts, and videos of some of them can be seen on YouTube, for example at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCmgkfEWN6s.

Is Brook’s approach widely used today? My impression is that it is not, certainly not extensively, partly because of financial restraints. In the United States the salaries of members of Actors Equity, the actors’ union, are carefully regulated, and there is no volunteering.

At the same time a workshop by definition is not a performance, so its capability for raising money is limited, and it usually has to be financed by grants and donations, which are not necessarily easy to come by. However, Brooks’ influence is not limited to one approach, and Jones looks at his work from other angles as well.

In this review I have tried to single out some highlights of this useful and provocative book, but I have barely scratched the surface. I personally have found the book inspirational; I intend to apply many of its insights to my own work if I possibly can. I would think that any director would benefit from reading this book; so would anyone interested in learning more about the countless variables that go into a theatrical production.

[When I read “Great Directors at Work,” I had a number of responses, mostly in support or illustration of Kirk’s comments on the book and Jones’s ideas about directing.  I’ve collected some of those reader responses to append here, at the end of the posting of Kirk’s report, just to continue the conversation.

[First, however, for ROTters who’ve been following the serialization of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008,” which I’ve interrupted to post Kirk’s report: I’ll be publishing the next installment, Chapter 7, “What Is to Be Done?” on Thursday, 30 November.  I hope that you’ll all come back to ROT when I pick up that thread.

[When Kirk remarks, for instance, on the rise in significance of the director after Jones's book came out (1986), I thought of the establishment of the stage directors’ union, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC – now the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, or SDC) as a manifestation of this. 

[Though SSDC was founded in 1959 and Broadway producers recognized it in 1967, it wasn’t until eight years later that the union won the important litigation establishing that its members are employees. This set the precedent on which SDC bases its authority, affording it the recognition as a significant force in the theater.   

[Coincidentally—or maybe not—at about the same time, theatrical director Geoffrey Shlaes (1951-2016) launched the American Directors Institute.  ADI, founded in 1985, was intended to inform both theatergoers and members of the theater fraternity who aren’t directors what directors do, and to facilitate networking among directors and artistic directors and give them a forum for exchanging ideas about and techniques for directing.  ADI was dissolved in 1992.  (In the interest of full disclosure, Geoff engaged me in 1986 to launch and edit its newsletter, which I entitled Directors Notes; I turned the editorship over to a successor in 1988 before I went upstate to take a teaching job at a State University college.)

[When Kirk quotes Jones on "directorial authority," and equates it with “independence and power,” I remarked that Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) wrote in Vs. Meyerhold: On the Theatre (1912; as quoted in Alma Law and Mel Gordon’s Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia [1996]) that "the director [is] the 'author' of a theatrical production."  The innovative Russian director went on to explain: “He creates the performance text, determines its overall style and himself works out every stage action.”

[One reaction I had was to a turn of phrase Kirk used that relates to a pet peeve of mine: “begging the question.”  I note it here just to record my delight in its (correct) appearance on Rick On Theater.  My note in Kirk’s text was simply “Hooray!” because almost everyone who uses this expression—it often appears on TV on both news and commentary shows and in scripted series—misuses it.  I was delighted to see that Kirk didn’t. 

[As Marilyn vos Savant (b. 1946), the super-intelligent columnist (“Ask Marilyn” in Parade), explains that begging the question is a logical fallacy “also known as ‘circular reasoning’; it refers to the error of basing one’s conclusion on an assumption, often a form of the conclusion.” 

[Kirk was referring to the statement by Jones that the century between 1880 and 1980 was “comparable or superior to the eras of Sophocles and Shakespeare” with respect to its theater, for a list of reasons concluding with “artistic achievement.” 

[It was this last criterion that Kirk branded begging the question because for Jones to include it in his list, he had to assume that there’s a universally accepted standard of judgment by which the theater of the period would merit being labeled artistically significant.  There isn’t, so it’s just Jones’s opinion, and he uses it as evidence that the century’s theater was an “artistic achievement.”  That’s circular reasoning based on an assumption.  (The other three criteria are measurable or observable.)

[Vos Savant adds that the misuse “became so common that the term began to acquire a new meaning: ‘raises the question,’ followed by a question.”  The correct use of the phrase, the columnist points out, “is a complete statement.  No question follows.”  (On 8 April 2014, I added Savant’s column as a Comment to a blog post called “Words on Words,” 1 February 2014.)

[In regard to Kirk’s remarks on the "alienation effect," I referenced my comments on the Verfremdungseffekt and the translation of the name in "Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations" (4 July 2010).  Readers can call it up themselves (Rick On Theater: Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations), but I want to reiterate my objection to the common English rendering of the term.

[Kirk notes that Verfremdungseffekt, a word Brecht made up, “is often translated in English” as ‘alienation effect.’  That’s true, but it’s really a misleading expression.  Brecht never wanted to alienate the audience in the sense of making them unfriendly or hostile.  What he wanted was to let the spectators see ideas and images to which they’d become accustomed as if they were new and unfamiliar.  Brecht devised several techniques to de-familiarize what audiences were seeing so they would actively contemplate it anew, with a untainted perspective.

[The German verb verfremden doesn’t really exist, except in Brecht’s specific usage. Ver- is a prefix that sometimes means ‘to become . . . ,’ especially when affixed to an adjective.  The adjective fremd means ‘strange’ or ‘foreign,’ so, verfremden (-ung is the German gerund suffix, comparable to ‘-ing’ in English) would mean ‘to become strange’ or ‘to become unfamiliar.’  As slightly awkward as it is, I prefer “defamiliarizing effect” as a translation for Brecht’s word.

[Sticking with Bertolt Brecht for another moment, Kirk brings up the Brechtian tactic of invoking the “large number of details, some of them very small.” in his plays.  This is also the process of hyperreal theater—though the performance style is different.  In my post on "Hyperreal Theater" (16 January 2021), I compared several specifics of hyperreal style to Brechtian practices, though I didn't include this one.  Perhaps I should have.  It’s the attention to very specific detail in the characters’ behavior as well as the physical environment that creates the illusion of hyperreality.

[When he begins his report on Jones’s discussion of the work of Peter Brook, Kirk expresses the wish that Jones had chosen to analyze Brook’s celebrated circus-infused Midsummer Night’s Dream. On 6 November 1988, theater critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator Robert Brustein (1927-2023) published an essay in the New York Times’ "Arts and Leisure" section called “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?"  In it, he examines “the reinterpretation or ‘deconstruction’ of celebrated classical plays,” dividing them into “the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor.”

[In the essay, Brustein calls Brook’s Midsummer one of "two fine examples of metaphorical theater" (the other is his 1962 Beckettian production of King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company), his label for the work of directors "attempt[ing] to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent—. . . since the director 'authors' the production much as the author writes the text." (Note the near-quotation of Meyerhold’s assertion I quoted above.) 

[I posted Brustein’s essay on ROT on 10 March 2011, and previously wrote a commentary on the article, "Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage," posted on 18 September 2009.]

Peter Brook’s 'Tierno Bokar'

[I’ve just published a report on Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research (ROT, 25 August) in which I mentioned the director’s production of Tierno Bokar at Columbia University. As a follow-up to that article, I’m publishing my 2005 performance report on Brook’s production. Note that this assessment was originally a comment to some friends on a casual basis, so the tone is less formal than some of my later theater reports.

[Tierno Bokar Saalif Tall (1875–1939) was a Sufi sage, a member of a distinguished clan, and a spiritual leader in his village in what is now Mali. His clan, exponents of repeating a Sufi prayer 12 times, was embroiled in a debate with a rival clan that advocated repeating it 11 times, a debate that devolved into a conflict over power and leadership in the Tidjani Sufi Order. When Tierno eventually became a follower of Hamallah, a member of the rival clan, he was cast out by family, relatives, and clan, branded a traitor, and forbidden to teach or pray publicly. His enemies further ostracized him by collaborating with the French colonial powers, portraying him as a fomenter of rebellion against French rule. Tierno died impoverished and isolated. The play Tierno Bokar is based on Malian writer Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s book about his studies with Tierno, Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar: le sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Editions Présence Africaine, 1957; translated as A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar, 2008).]

Diana, my frequent theater companion, and I got tickets for Peter Brook’s Tierno Bokar on Tuesday, 19 April [2005]. Brook's in residence at Columbia University under the auspices of the Columbia University Arts Initiative which is headed by Gregory Mosher, formerly of Lincoln Center (and before that, the Goodman in Chicago). Brook and his troupe, Centre International de Créations Théâtrales (CICT), are performing Tierno Bokar, based on the biography of "the Sage of Bandiagara," at Barnard College; there didn't seem to be any student involvement, so I don't know how the residency/sponsorship works at Columbia.

Where to start, where to start?

Bokar, of whom I had never heard before, was a Sufi Muslim teacher who lived in French colonial Mali (then called Upper Volta, I believe) from 1875 to 1939. He became part of a conflict with another clan over the recitation of a prayer, "The Pearl of Perfection," which his group believed should be said 12 times, while the opposing clan believed it should be said 11 times. This conflict ultimately led to violence and gave the French an excuse to crack down on all of the native subjects. Bokar went to the leader of the Elevens and reached an understanding with him, causing his own clan to ostracize him. He essentially died an exile in his own village. According to Brook's statement in the program, his point is to "illuminate . . . the power of violence and the true nature of a tolerance that is more powerful still." Well, that's certainly a nice notion, laudatory, even—perfectly in keeping with Brook's politics and philosophy. Unhappily, the performance didn't accomplish this as far as I was concerned.

Well, to begin with, Margo Jefferson was way too generous with Brook in the Times on the 7th. She seems to suggest that it's worth seeing the performance: "Still, research is a journey, and journeys can matter as much as arrivals." In this case, neither the journey nor the arrival were worth much. In fact, I'd venture that there was no arrival—it was just an endless journey! I finally read Gordon Cox’s Newsday review of the 7th from the 'Net, and it's more accurate perhaps, but still too kind. [Jefferson’s New York Times review on 7 April 2005 was entitled “Timeless Lessons on Tolerance Imparted by a Sufi Sage From Colonial Africa”; Cox’s Newsday notice seems to have only had the headline “Theater Review” and no longer appears to be available to non-subscribers.]

There are maybe half a dozen serious problems with Tierno Bokar, some large, some small, but the most pervasive and all-encompassing is that it isn't theater! It's storytelling—which is an art, but a different art. (When I say 'storytelling,' I mean the kinds of performance that are part of the tradition in places like India, where itinerant storytellers go from town to town, sit in the village square or someplace, and recount the legends of their people, unraveling an illustrated scroll—sort of like a linear comic strip . . . er, 'graphic novel.' I've see this on tape, and it can be marvelous—the storyteller is a true performer—but it's different from 'theater' as we usually understand it. Africa has this tradition, their griots being charged with recounting the village history—though that may be almost the same as the myths and legends of India, I guess—and many American Indian cultures also have this tradition. Since neither African nor Native American languages had a written form originally, it's obvious where this tradition of storytelling comes from. And, perhaps, why we've lost it in the West to a great degree.)

Tierno Bokar has virtually no physical action of any kind—either innate or imposed (like dancing or rhythmic movement to symbolize something) and the two types of speech are not just untheatrical, they're anti-theatrical: narration (which is almost never theatrical, much less dramatic) and what I can best describe as "instruction" (where someone, usually Bokar, gives a brief lesson to someone else). It's not conversation, much less dialogue. And it's enervating, to say the least. I had trouble keeping my mind from wandering (that's not accurate: I failed often to keep my mind from wandering), and Diana actually nodded off at least once. Maybe we're both ignoramuses, but I posit that that reaction says something about the performance! If Brook is going for minimalism—and he was a follower of Grotowski in his early days—he seems to have jumped over a few steps. Even Grotowski acknowledged the need for acting (well, actors—but the latter seems to presume the former), but Tierno Bokar had no 'acting' in it—just some 'positioning'—not really 'movement'—and recitation/narration. And Grotowski decided that the playwright wasn't a necessity, suggesting that the text was secondary to some extent. This implies that the actors’ work was paramount in communicating ideas, but Tierno Bokar relied on text almost exclusively—words you either read (the supertitles) or heard, but not actions at all. If Brook had had some kind of narrator, like the Kabuki or Noh singer at the side of the stage, while his actors 'performed' the roles and events of the story, maybe in ritualized movement or dance, that might have been something. If the text had been sung or chanted, like we believe Greek drama was presented, that might have been theatrical. (I don't say any of this would have worked—I don't know.) But what Brook presented here was basically narration in which the actors became the speaker/storyteller plus the illustrated scroll—and just about as animated; Diana raised the comparison with 'tableaux.' Anyway, he seems to have jumped over the positions on the continuum of theater that included anything theatrical; he went from what he apparently sees as too much spectacle right to dead air. (Can you say, "Nothingism"? That's the step after Minimalism. It's not the same as "Nihilism," by the way.)

This is all exacerbated by the fact that, since the performance is in French with supertitles, you have to keep reading the words above the actors' heads—the whole piece is the text, after all; there isn't anything else—so you do more reading than watching anyway. I still speak French, but it's not good enough to handle a performance, even though the language was close to elementary-school level. (If your whole piece rests on words, the words, I'd think, should be . . . well, scintillating is a word that comes to mind. This sounded exactly like what I suspect it was—quotations lifted directly from the biography of Bokar that is the basis of Brook's text. Research, indeed! Comes awfully close to plagiarism for my dough! Speaking of which—the tickets were 40 bucks a pop!)

It didn't help, by the way, that the seats in the performance space, a converted gym, were excruciatingly hard—for an hour-and-a-half, intermissionless sitz.

Brook's reputation rests on his innovation and avant-garde convention-breaking, but there were no theatrical techniques on display here at all—neither old, traditional ones nor new, radical interpretations. "Pushing boundaries," if that’s what Brook does, suggests to me that something more ought to have been going on than there was. If creating a totally enervating experience is "pushing the boundaries," then maybe that's what Brook was doing—but it strikes me as an accomplishment that demands (but not 'begs') the question, "Why?" I'll amend that: the question ought to be "WHY??!!" Like I said: not theater.

I guess, if we're ranking the problems, the next one down would be the central plot element: the conflict between Bokar’s Twelves and the Elevens. I understand that this is a symbolic struggle, but it was Little-Endians vs. Big-Endians to me—it made no sense, I couldn't understand it, and it was unengaging to me. Therefore, I didn't really care about the struggle. It seemed so senseless, even though I understood intellectually that it was important to the participants, that I was not engaged. (Brook wrote in the program, "All through human history, every society ends up by getting it wrong. In the beginning there is always a bold rush of energy. This creates new, fresh structures, but they soon turn into institutions which from then on slowly become fossils." That's the closest Brook or the play—in which these lines don't appear—comes to explaining anything.) I suppose it didn't help matters that the acting was so low-key (I think the Newsday reviewer remarked on this phenomenon—he was right) that the performances didn't substitute for the lack of intellectual conflict I felt (or, I guess, didn't feel). Remember Chekhov? It is often said of his plays, especially Uncle Vanya, that in a play about boredom, the acting cannot be boring. Well, Brook forgot this lesson. (Apologies to Grotowski, but there is something to say for spectacle!)

I also never figured out why the French got involved in this struggle. I know, again in my head, that this was just an excuse for the colonial masters to suppress and brutalize the natives, but I still don't see why they even cared one way or another even minimally. I can guess that the struggle became so violent that the French had to start arresting and imprisoning leaders from both sides to try to restore peace or something, even if they didn't care which side prevailed, but that wasn't in the play as far as I could see. Besides, the French brutality was only recounted in the narration—it was never represented on stage. (There were a few early scenes of colonial arrogance—but they were more ludicrous than frightening. School teachers extolled the virtues of France and encouraged the students and native teacher to sing a patriotic song which held no real meaning for them, of course. The French did invent chauvinism, of course.) Besides, do we really need to be told again that Western imperialism is destructive, bad, immoral, and brutal? We hardly need a play about an obscure figure who died almost 70 years ago to tell us that anyway—we only have to watch the news from Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the legacy of modern Africa (can you say Sudan and Rwanda?).

I've already remarked on the acting—there isn't more to say than that it was minimal to the level of invisibility—and I guess the point that there was no staging to speak of says all that's needed about the physical directing. The set looked interesting when we went into the theater— the Newsday description is accurate—but nothing was made of any of it. Once or twice, a rug was used to represent a river that had to be crossed, but for the most part, everything was literal.

Remember my personal criteria for good theater? It has to do more than tell a story and it has to do it in a way that uses the attributes of live performance (that is, be theatrical in some way). Well, Brook did just the opposite as far as I'm concerned. He just told a story and he didn't do anything at all theatrical. I'd say that gets an F.

I'll add one further comment: This was all the more disappointing—maybe there's a stronger word—because it was Brook. Despite the reviews, Diana and I both went in expecting something at least interesting if not exciting. Brook's image as an innovator and experimenter implied that there'd be something going on, even if it was unsuccessful. The raised expectations made the experience even more of a let-down. Tierno Bokar didn't look like anything more than an amateur attempt to translate a prose narrative into a staged retelling. (Do you know about the so-called Purim play? Little kids put one on in most temples; it's an enactment of the story of Esther, Ahasuerus, and Haman. Tierno Bokar kept reminding me of this. At least, at the end of a Purim play, you get to have some Hamentaschen—little triangular pastries. In this case, I could have used a stiff drink!)

You know, I have the impression I had more to say right after I saw the performance, but I've already forgotten it all. I've either got early Alzheimer's, or that says something about this experience.

[Tierno Bokar was adapted by Marie-Hélène Estienne from the book by Amadou Hampaté Bâ (1901-1991). The production featured music by Toshi Tsuchitori and Antonin Stahly and lighting design by Phillipe Vialatte. Sotigui Kouyaté, from Burkina Faso, who appeared in Brook's Mahabharata, The Tempest, and other productions, played Tierno Bokar. (Kouyaté died in Paris in 2010 at the age of 73.) Brook and CICT spent a month in residence at Columbia in the spring of 2005. Forty-four related events sponsored by the Columbia University Arts Initiative in partnership with the Harlem Arts Alliance and Barnard College included symposia, lectures, workshops, and class work. The Columbia University Arts Initiative, directed by Gregory Mosher, was launched in February 2004. In 2010, Brook presented 11 and 12, an expanded version of Tierno Bokar; based on the same material, this play is performed in English.]

Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research

[Peter Brook, the British stage and film director with an international reputation for innovation and experimentation and the author of The Empty Space (1968), a book that had tremendous influence on almost every Western theater artist in the 1960s and ‘70s, has recently returned to New York City and Lincoln Center. Just as he did in 1981 with La Tragédie de Carmen, Brook’s has adapted a famous opera by paring it down to what he considers the essentials. This time, it’s Mozart: Brook’s production of A Magic Flute was at John Jay College as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

[Brook began his directing career with a 1943 production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus at the Torch Theatre in London. He followed that in 1945 with more contemporary fare, Jean Cocteau’s 1934 Infernal Machine, a retelling of the Oedipus story, at the Chanticleer Theatre. Brook directed all around England, gaining considerable acclaim, joining the Royal Shakespeare company as a resident director in the early 1960s. He remained with the company, directing Shakespearean plays and other classics, often in innovative stagings, as well as contemporary works, perhaps the most famous of which was the RSC production of Peter Weiss’s theater-of-cruelty script, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (known universally—for obvious reasons—as Marat/Sade) in 1964. The director’s famous circus-infused version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was presented in 1970, influencing nearly every other director who saw it—or even heard about it. Brook, who also directed several films (many based on his stage plays) and wrote six more books since The Empty Space, was at the height of his renown when he decided to abandon the life of a successful and sought-after stage director, move to Paris, and form an international theater research center.

[This article is a brief analysis, however superficial, of some of Brook’s early work with his International Centre of Theatre Research, covering the period from its start to about 1974. Among the impressions revealed are the influence of some of Brook’s most significant inspirations: E. Gordon Craig, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.]

Few theoreticians of the craft of acting have had the conviction to abandon a financially successful career in the commercial theater and strike out to put their theories into practice on a grand scale. Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99) did so, but they had the advantage of state-supported programs to release them from the worry of financial backing. Peter Brook (b. 1925), however, did so without the support of his own government, and even removed himself from his native England in order to carry out his experiments in the training of the actor. In 1968, having obtained private funding, Brook and Micheline Rozan gathered together an international group of young theater people in Paris and established the International Centre of Theatre Research (known as CIRT, for the French name, Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale) in the Mobilier National, a former Gobelin tapestry factory on the Left Bank. The company, as it eventually evolved, was made up of fifteen to twenty actors from Iran, Mali, France, Greece, the U.S., Spain, Portugal, Japan, and Morocco; five directors from England, Romania, Armenia, and Germany, and one Swiss designer. Brook himself and Ted Hughes, an English poet, completed the company. Except for the period from 1968 to 1970 when CIRT removed to London because of the 1968 student riots in Paris, Brook’s company remained disconnected from his original base of operations in England. In 1974, CIRT took over the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, a theater near the Gare du Nord in Paris’s 10th Arrondissement, where the company has remained. In 2008, Brook, then 83, resigned the artistic directorship of CIRT, handing it over to Olivier Mantei, then director of the Opéra-Comique, and Olivier Poubelle, a theater entrepreneur. (Rozan, then about 80, also stepped down at the same time.)

Because Brook believed that privacy was an absolutely necessary element in the training regimen, the working sessions at CIRT were closed to visitors except for specially scheduled, prearranged experiments opened to a specific audience. No public “performances” were held at the factory. Indeed, Brook’s work in those years wasn’t performance-oriented in any way. If an experimental performance developed out of one of CIRT’s exercises, Brook might select an audience of Paris children (one of his favorite audiences) and invite them to participate. In other cases, the company might go into the rural suburbs or workers’ districts of Paris and present its work to an audience of unsophisticated, theatrically naïve spectators. On three occasions, CIRT took its work on international tours in order to test Brook’s theories regarding language and communication: Shiraz and Persepolis, Iran (1971); Africa (Spring 1973); and New York (Brooklyn Academy of Music, Fall 1973). After the BAM sessions, the Centre ceased to function for several years, terminating Brook’s training experiments.

Though Brook’s foremost purpose for establishing CIRT was to train his ideal actor, a combination of acrobat, juggler, singer, dancer, and clown, he was also committed to the development of a universal theater, and therefore had theories not only on how to train an actor, but on how to relate to an audience, how to construct a piece of theater, and how to stage a performance. These theories necessarily affected his program of training for his company and consequently the work that came out of that program.

The general belief upon which Brook based his concept of the ideal theater was that the world of experience is divided into two parts: the everyday world and the imaginary world. In adult society, according to Brook, the two worlds are separated arbitrarily, whereas children, when they play, pass effortlessly between the two worlds, accepting the fact that the everyday world has elements of imagination and the imaginary world has elements of the everyday. In the adult theater, as in adult society, this blending isn’t accepted: when the curtain goes up in the theater of illusion, so does the finite division of the everyday world from the imaginary world. It was Brook’s contention that this arbitrary separation was both untrue and unhealthy. He advocated the coexisting relationship as the healthy one and the one that, in art, would revitalize the theater. With the acceptance of the free flow between the imaginary and everyday worlds, the adult actor would be able to accomplish the kind of free use of space in adult theater that is characteristic of children’s theater. For Brook, the division of these two theaters was as invalid as the separation of the two experiential worlds. In Brook’s ideal theater, the actors would be capable of passing back and forth between the two worlds for an audience equally capable of accepting that transition.

Because Brook wanted a theater in which the distinction between the everyday and imaginary worlds was blurred, he also required a special relationship between the performers and the audience. Whereas he previously looked upon the audience with an aggressive, even assaultive viewpoint, as exemplified in his 1964 production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, Brook now considered the audience as a partner in the complete experience. To aid in this interplay, Brook looked for what he called “a walking theater” wherein the audience, instead of remaining static, would move about and experience the presentation from various angles. (This was 16 years before the Royal Court’s presentation of Jim Cartwright’s Road, called a “promenade” production where the actors and the spectators occupied the same space and moved among one another. Seven years before Brook spoke of this concept, playwright John Arden wrote about a day-long event, with spectators coming and going and “rival attractions” offered in the atmosphere of a “fairground or amusement park” with “all sorts of thematically-relevant interludes” intermingled; he called this “a kind of ‘promenade theater’” in his preface to 1963’s The Workhouse Donkey. In 1967, Arden and his NYU theater students presented such an event, entitled War Carnival, in New York’s East Village.)

Furthermore, the CIRT presentations weren’t to be set down and repeated at a specific time and place on a regular schedule. In Brook’s theory of a universal theater, a piece should ideally be performed in as many different milieus as possible, appearing unannounced at irregular times in different places in order to make it available to as many diverse audiences as possible. (Today we recognize this practice as guerrilla theater, a term coined in 1965 by the San Francisco Mime Troupe.) Repetition, both in rehearsal and in performance, was the bane of art to Brook. Ideally no work should ever be obligated to a replay at all, unless in the estimation of the performers/creators, it still had something to offer. Even then, of course, the second performance must not be a mere copy of the first, but perhaps changed entirely as it went along. (In the United States, experimental director Richard Schechner took up Brook’s initiative with the Performance Group, most notably in Dionysus in 69, 1968, Makbeth, 1969, and Cops, 1978. Earlier, however, the Living Theatre had pioneered an improvisational technique in its productions such as The Connection, 1959, and The Brig, 1963. Joe Chaikin, an alumnus of the Living, followed some of its practices with the Open Theater, most noticeably in Viet-Rock, 1966, and The Serpent, 1969.)

With these ultimate goals for the theater well in mind, Brook established CIRT and created a training program to develop actors for his ideal theater. The Centre wasn’t to be a repertory theater or an acting academy, but a laboratory devoted to experimentation and research, with no particular end in mind. (This, of course, is reminiscent of the Teatr Laboratorium, which Jerzy Grotowski, one of Brook’s principal influences, founded in 1965 in Wroclaw, Poland.) Brook was quite adamant in stating that CIRT wasn’t designed to prove any preconceived beliefs or to find specific answers to specific questions. Brook was as concerned with discovering the questions as he was with answers that developed. For this reason, the Centre’s company was selected for its diversity in background and training as well as nationality. They were all young, in their middle or late twenties and early thirties; came from varying training programs; and had varying, but not vast, experience in performance. There was no common language, an important factor in Brook’s experimentation with language and communication, though French and English gradually became the lingua francas of the company. One of the most vital criteria for inclusion in the group was that each entrant must bring something to share with the others. Since there were no trainers, no teachers or instructors—Brook himself was often a participant in the experiments—the exercises were each led by one of the company who was best qualified to do so.

As important as the diversity of the parts was the cohesiveness of the whole, Brook envisioned his theater as a communal experience, and required a high degree of “ensembleness” from the company. Brook wanted a group so connected, so integrated “that a move from one creates a tremor from another; an impulse from a third, an immediate chain-reaction.” In order to be so connected with their fellows, however, Brook believed that actors had to be finely attuned to themselves first. Most of Brook’s exercises and experiments were directed toward this end. The dance, acrobatics, and singing were, on the surface, a program for training the actors’ bodies and voices. But at bottom they were designed to develop in the actors the ability to relate so organically to their own bodies that their thoughts and actions became one.

One of the areas in which Brook and the company concentrated very heavily was the use of language, speech, and sound. In order to connect more organically with language, Brook experimented with speech in various ways, searching for a method of communicating on a direct emotional or biological level, without resorting to intellect. Ultimately, he was looking, he said, for “a form of theatre which makes the same impression anywhere in the world without reference to language.” In his search for a universal dramatic communications system, Brook had his company study ancient languages such as Latin and Greek, and various modern languages such as a Malinese (African) dialect and Japanese. (In 1974, Andrei Serban, who had studied with Brook at CIRT, presented Fragments of a Greek Trilogy at La MaMa E.T.C. using similar language techniques.) The CIRT troupe studied these languages not for their linguistic properties, but their sonorous qualities. The Malinese and Japanese languages were used in native songs taught by the company members from those countries. In further linguistic exercises, the CIRT company used English, often Shakespearean lines, and repeated them at great speed or at a slowed-down pace to exaggerate the sounds that made up the words and to disassociate the meanings superimposed on them. In other instances, one word was stretched out to seven or eight seconds to explore all its sonorous aspects.

Brook’s most ambitious attempt to remove theater from the shackles of conventional language, however, was his use of invented artificial languages. The first such language used in his experiments was Bashtahondo, a language made up of syllables contributed by the members of the company, each contributing one syllable. The name of the language was the first four syllables of the new language. A large number of the company’s exercises were conducted in Bashtahondo to restrict the reliance of the actors on verbal communication. The culmination of this experimentation was the development of CIRT’s experimental piece Orghast, performed at Shiraz and Persepolis, Iran, in 1971. For this piece, which was based on a combination of Zoroastrian and Greek myths concerning the theft of fire, its worship, and the eternal warfare between father and son, Ted Hughes, CIRT’s poet-in-residence, created a new language, also called Orghast, from words and sounds culled from Sanskrit; Persian (Farsi); Greek; Latin; and Avesta, the ancient Zoroastrian ceremonial language.

Neither Orghast nor Bashtahondo were developed in an attempt to find a theatrical Esperanto, a universal language into which all CIRT pieces could be translated. It was Brook’s contention that human beings should be able to communicate with one another without regard to their mother tongues, that a form of basic, biological communication is possible based on sound which has meaning such as music or the grunts and groans by which primitive humans communicated. In dealing with English, the company was searching for “the primal impulse in the sound of a word, what informed it at its coining before it became tarnished with semantic associations . . . .”

Equally as important as CIRT’s search for a universal form of communication between performer and spectator was their work in enhancing the actors’ communication with their colleagues. Various exercises were devised to develop the members’ abilities to respond to each other organically—without the necessity of verbal communication. In one exercise toward this end, a group of actors, each representing separate parts of a particular person, including the invisible functions such as voice and subconscious, tried to create a coherent whole of the parts. This exercise was designed to develop in the individual actors the sensitivity to each other as separate parts of a unified entity, harking back to Brook’s concept of an ensemble company. In another exercise which developed the actor’s attention to implication and innuendo, one actor was being interviewed for a job and the rest of the company acted as extensions of that actor’s personality, speaking what he or she “meant” as they understood the replies to the interviewer’s questions. A third exercise used to develop an actor’s awareness of another’s movements and impulses was a mirror exercise wherein a pair of actors stood face to face and tried to duplicate the movements of each other simultaneously as if acting as a mirror for each other. Sometimes one actor would initiate the movement, sometimes the other would do so, and sometimes neither would be the initiator.

Improvisation was also used extensively by the CIRT trainees to train the actor to respond truly to the actions of other actors. These improvisations were conducted in Bashtahondo and, when the situation became confused or began to pall, Brook altered the circumstances by introducing some new element such as reversing the characters, advancing the time, speeding up the lapsed time of the action, heightening the rhythm, or adding characters. One thing they were searching for was a sort of philosopher’s stone of improvisations: a set of characters that could be rearranged into an infinite number of situations. They came up with The Difficulties of a Bridegroom about a “shy lover’s travails.”

The props used in these improvisations were as restricted as was the language. Most common among CIRT’s props were bamboo sticks, derived from their use in Japanese theater as a means of achieving “Zen calm.” The sticks were used in varying ways as extensions of the body, voice, and psyche to contact the other actors, measure an actor’s relationship to space, and elicit non-verbal responses form the other actors. Another such prop was a simple box which the actors explored in improvisations in which they were to discover the various possibilities of the box. In both cases, Brook’s idea was to require his company to expand their awareness and knowledge of simple, common objects so that the actors could approach more realistic objects on a set with enhanced sensitivity. This seems clearly to be an application of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the defamiliarization process he sought.

A fourth concentration for Brook’s trainees was self-awareness. To help achieve this, CIRT borrowed an ancient Chinese martial art exercise, T’ai Chi, an exercise in which simple movements are executed very slowly and gracefully with the knees slightly bent to cause all the muscles to balance against each other. T’ai Chi was used to still the spirit in preparation for bodily awareness. For further development of such awareness, an actor was required to make a gesture, then remain still for up to a half an hour trying to recall the exact gesture. Then the actor attempted to reproduce the gesture exactly as originally made. This was a test of “muscular memory” as well as an analysis of the gesture’s meaning.

CIRT’s concentration, then, was in four major areas: communicating with the audience, relating to other actors, relating to objects, and relating to oneself. Did any of this work in practice? According to many critics, in the final analysis, it didn’t. Either communication broke down entirely, or the performers had to resort to standard verbal communication. In so far as the search for a universal language was concerned, one constant problem was that even the artificial language Orghast eventually came to depend on the environment for its meaning. The variables of the circumstances—place, space and acoustics, specific actors, and so on—had a definite effect on the language, and couldn’t be separated from it. Furthermore, Orghast was capable only of conveying feelings and emotions and couldn’t deal with abstractions. In this respect it limited the play’s creators’ ability to communicate with a sophisticated audience.

Brook’s theory that repetition brings sterility to art, though it may theoretically be valid, caused a conflict involving Brook’s biggest problem: striking a balance between freedom and form. He felt that, as it was absurd to prepare dinner party conversation beforehand, it was equally absurd to rehearse what an actor will perform on a stage. It then remains a question of how to arrive at a disciplined, quality performance when dealing solely with freedom and spontaneity. Part of the art of acting is selecting behavior; selection is obviated if there is no rehearsal.

Another difficulty in communicating with the spectators, Burt Supree of the Village Voice found, was “the feeling of a mystique operating here that oppressed me.” He went on to explain:

The company never acknowledged the existence of an audience. No contact. I suppose they were concentrating, but the utter humorlessness of the situation, the holiness and exclusiveness, made things very difficult for me. I found myself hardening my heart against what was going on and had to wrestle throughout the day to keep myself open to the company’s work. It was a constant concern.

As for performers who could adapt to new and unplanned circumstances and react as an integrated ensemble, Walter Kerr of the New York Times found the CIRT company unresponsive and stiff. At the BAM sessions, Kerr found:

When Mr. Brook suggested that the company might try dividing the performing area into Hollywood and Broadway . . . the company sat immobile for a very long time trying to think through that one. It never did. Eventually a few performers rose and made use of the same leaps and hop-steps they’d been employing all day, ‘finding’ nothing new, nothing distinctive, nothing illuminating . . . . Spontaneously, the happening didn’t happen.

Furthermore, Kerr found that these actors, presumably finely tuned and in touch with all their organic resources, couldn’t function beyond the limits expected of any run-of-the-mill performer: their “physical vocabulary” was “extraordinarily limited”:

Though the performers were constantly flirting with mime, they weren’t skilled mimes; though they had taken pains to release their bodies, they weren’t dancers, or anything like; and when it was time to enunciate simple-enough sentences, they proved not to be the trained actors either.

In the final analysis, Brook’s experiments seem to have produced only one fact: they didn’t really work. At least not for most observers, if the critics are any indication. The very fact that Brook tried is of course significant, and the results, even if they’re viewed as failures, cannot be ignored. What he seemed to have discovered in the end was that no one can entirely reconcile absolute freedom and spontaneity with discipline and form. Brook tried to have both, and ended up losing the one necessary element to all theater: the spectator’s attention and awareness. This, it would seem, was the final, and sole contribution to the world theater of Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research.

[The experimental period of CIRT ended in 1974, and Brook and his company returned to more audience-cognizant performances, changing the company’s name to the Centre International de Créations Théâtrales (CICT – International Center for Theater Creations). After Brook directed his own version of La Tragédie de Carmen at Lincoln Center (1981), in 1985 he and playwright Jean-Claude Carrière adapted the great Indian epic The Ramayana for the stage. Brook followed that with more conventional fare, from classics like The Cherry Orchard (1981) to new works such as Woza Albert! (1989). In 2004, he presented Tierno Bokar, a stage adaptation of a biography of the Malian Sufi sage, at Columbia University. Recently (5-17 July), Brook’s staging of A Magic Flute, his rendering of Mozart’s opera, was on stage at John Jay College as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

[I saw Tierno Bokar in April 2005, though I didn’t care much for it. I’ll post the report I wrote on the performance then in the next few days. Come back to ROT if you’re curious about my response to this Peter Brook production. (Among the other works mentioned here, I have posted reports on Arden’s War Carnival, 13 May 2010; the Living’s Connection, 9 July 2009; and Serban’s Fragments, 9 April 2011.)]