Threads of Time: A Memoir(Theatre Makers)

Peter Brook is, without doubt, the contemporary theatre's greatest inventor. With a lifetime of work, he has held audiences spellbound with his critically acclaimed productions. In this memoir, which moves freely back and forth between time and key personal events, Brook writes an account of the most significant moments in his life. Born in 1925 in London, at twenty-one, Brook became the enfant terrible of British theatre, directing major post-war productions of Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, opera at Covent Garden and new plays in London's West End. But, as he reveals here, his first love was the cinema and his career has always included the making of films alongside the making of theatre and opera. In 1964, Brook produced Peter Weiss's The Marat/ Sade for the Royal Shakespeare Company and his whole approach to theatre became radicalised. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Brook began relentlessly to explore the roots of non-Western theatre, which once again changed his view of what theatre could be for actors and audiences. His journey took him to Paris where eventually he founded a company at the Bouffes du Nord theatre. In this autobiography, Peter Brook not only unfolds the many threads of his ever-changing artistic fortunes, but also the different strands of an intimate quest for meaning.

About the Author :
Peter Brook (b. 1925) is a British theatre director, noted for his strikingly original productions. The child of Russian emigrés, Brook made his debut at the age of 18 with a production of Marlowe's Dr Faustus. In 1945 Brook was invited to direct Paul Scofield in King John at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, following this with a celebrated production of Love's Labours Lost (1946) at Stratford-upon-Avon (again with Scofield). Further successes included Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon (1950), Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1953), Hamlet (1955), The Power and the Glory (1956), and The Family Reunion (1956). Brook was made a codirector of the newly formed Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962, directing later that year a highly acclaimed production of King Lear (with Scofield once again). Other successes with the RSC included Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1964), Seneca's Oedipus (1968), and a famous production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1970), featuring an all-white set and the use of circus skills. In 1970 Brook founded, with Jean-Louis Barrault, the International Centre for Theatre Research, a company of international performers with whom he toured extensively. Since 1974 the Centre has been based at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Brook's subsequent productions have included a nine-hour adaptation of the Indian epic The Mahabharata (1985), a pared down version of Carmen (1989), and Qui est la? (1995), a reworking of Hamlet. In 2004 Brook presented Tierno Bokar, a meditation on the life and teachings of the title character, a Sufi mystic in French colonial Africa.

Review :
An autobiography in which its author stands naked and exposed Brook's descriptions of how these unusual pieces were collaboratively created are as absorbing as his cogent analyses of earlier working relationships with actors like Paul Scofield and John Gielgud. The director is not an other-worldly metaphysician: he relates his spiritual discoveries very precisely to the insights they gave him about the theater. There is no gossip; his two children are mentioned just once; his wife (actress Natasha Parry) appears primarily as a working companion. Instead of personal chit-chat, Brook offers the chronicle of a committed quest. It leaves a moving impression of a man deeply fulfilled both spiritually and artistically