My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  It was the last piece of theatre Brook created as a resident of England. For the subsequent thirty-five years of his life, he has roamed the globe from his base in Paris, seeking new forms in his determination to redefine theatrical truth, aiming for a form of storytelling that transcends national cultures, tapping into the universal. In the course of these often far-flung journeys – both geographical and artistic – he has delivered a number of the key productions of the late twentieth century and provided a continuous challenge to theatrical practice. He is widely acknowledged as the greatest living director in the world today, though there are those who feel that his supreme talent – his genius, as many would have it – has been misapplied, leading the theatre not closer to its true function, but in the opposite direction, into aestheticism and, horror of horrors, mysticism. There are also those who feel he has betrayed, or at least walked away from, his particular talent. Kenneth Tynan, in his diary – not quoted in Michael Kustow’s biography – cries, ‘How I wish Peter would stop tackling huge philosophical issues and return to thing he can do better than any other English director – i.e. startle us with stage magic. I don’t want to hear Peter on anthropology any more than I would have wanted to hear Houdini on spiritualism.’ One way or the other, he has been at the heart of the never-ending debate about the purpose of the theatre, a debate which would have been infinitely more limited without him. It is Kustow’s aim in this indispensable book to trace the trajectory of Brook’s crucial contribution to the discussion, both in his writings and in his productions. He succeeds brilliantly, and I defy anyone to read the book and not come away thinking better of the theatre, its scope, its passion, its contribution.

  It is the authorised biography, which means Kustow has had access, first of all to Brook himself, an elusive interviewee, and to a fascinating correspondence with his old childhood friend, Stephen Facey, both of which illuminate the narrative. The book is chastely free of gossip, and often omits some of the human mess that accompanies experiment of any sort, and, more surprisingly, some of the crises that Brook himself records in his autobiography Threads of Time (where he disarmingly tells us how close to disaster A Midsummer Night’s Dream came). Kustow has worked with Brook, on and off, and in many capacities, for over forty years; from this perspective of easy familiarity, he has set out to lay Brook’s career before us with clarity and sympathy, and in simply doing that, he offers a narrative as extraordinary as the sort of epic fable that the latter-day Brook has favoured for theatrical treatment. It is by no means a hagiography, but neither is it an intimate biography; certainly there is no attempt at psychoanalysis. In fact, the Brook Kustow presents to us, though altogether exceptional, is not especially complex; indeed, the portrait of the artist as a young man that Kustow offers is unexpectedly racy. Though he was conscious, as the son of Russian Jews, of his differentness from his fellow students first at Westminster then at Gresham’s public schools, his early life was one of material comfort, intellectual stimulation and constant encouragement. He was blessed with a relationship with his father which was wholly positive (his mother cuts a slightly less engaging figure), as a result of which he knew nothing ‘of the rejection of the father figure that is so much part of our time’. His intellectual precocity was encouraged (he read War and Peace at the age of nine) but not unduly spotlit. Stepping forth from the bosom of his family secure in his sense of being loved and wholly lacking in the typical Englishman’s instinct to apologise for his very existence, he took to the theatre with easy and instant mastery; there is no hint of neurosis about him whatever, nor is he driven by anything other than an awareness of his own brilliance and a determination to do justice to it. ‘For my first thirty years,’ Brook says, ‘I had nothing to connect with the phrase “inner life”. What was “inner life”? There was life. Everything was one hundred per cent extrovert.’

  While at Oxford, he directed Doctor Faustus, tracking down the aged Aleister Crowley to advise on the magic, thinking nothing of consorting with ‘the wickedest man in England’; in the absence of women he plunged with comfortable sensuality into ‘every homosexual affair I could’, exploring every facet of his sexual nature, until finally deciding, as he characteristically puts it, that female genitals were more congenial to him than male. No sooner had he come down from Oxford than he directed a production of Cocteau’s Infernal Machine, hopping over to Paris without a thought for a chat with the author and France’s greatest actor, Louis Jouvet. He was swiftly taken up by William Armstrong, of the Liverpool Rep, and Barry Jackson of Birmingham, where he first worked with Paul Scofield. All this before he was twenty-one. He then went to Stratford with Jackson, directing a Watteau-inspired Love’s Labour’s Lost, satisfying, as Kustow says, the post-war ache for beauty, then went on to direct Alec Guinness and Ernest Milton; he was appointed Ballet Correspondent for the Observer. His brutally realistic Stratford Romeo and Juliet brought him his first bad reviews, but it was seen by David Webster of the Royal Opera House, to whom Brook promptly wrote suggesting that they needed a Director of Productions and that he’d be just the fellow for the job: he got it. Despite a fine Boris Godunov (still in the repertory until the 1980s), his Salome, designed by Salvador Dalí, proved one provocation too many and his contract was not renewed. He was twenty-three. And so it went on: a mad whirligig, a unrelenting crescendo of success in the West End, at Stratford, in France, on Broadway, at the Metropolitan Opera House, across the whole spectrum of the theatre of the Fifties. Less successfully, he directed a film, The Beggar’s Opera, with no less a star than Laurence Olivier.

  At some point during this period, he came upon the writings of Peter Damian Ouspensky and the teaching of the Armenian avatar Gurdjieff, and found in it a view of the universe which accorded with his own understanding of himself, one based on a concept of life as the constant interplay of energies in which human personality often stood as an obstacle to experience of the real world. He absorbed this teaching into his life, submitting to its exercises and to the tough challenges of a teacher who persuaded him of ‘my own essential ordinariness’. Kustow says of this commitment: ‘Brook was seeking to master the maelstrom of his life. Gurdjieff promised him a way through his hothouse of emotions. He gave him a map of his desires.’ This is only partially true. Valiantly though he struggles with these difficult concepts, Kustow, the emotional rationalist, is not quite able to plug them into the main switchboard of Brook’s work. The image of a river which Brook himself offers – an underground river, sustaining, informing, refreshing – is perhaps closer. As it would be for a Marxist or Buddhist, there is no question that the habits of mind this teaching has inculcated are central to Brook’s life and his work, though it cannot explain it.

  By his mid-thirties he started to want to break out of the theatre of which he himself had been such a supreme exponent. He had always held himself separate from his contemporaries, standing outside the mainstream post-war British tradition of his generation: the rep, the university (he had fastidiously refrained from joining OUDS), the socialist movement; he regarded the Royal Court Revolution as narrow and insular. He now permanently renounced the boulevard, and joined Peter Hall’s new Royal Shakespeare Company, not without misgivings, worried that it was simply intending ‘to do good things very well, the traditional target of Liberal England’. If he was to join, he must have an Experimental studio. He had after all done everything else; had had in a mere ten years what would have been an entire career for some men. His studio work, inspired by Antonin Artaud and named after his celebrated essay, Theatre of Cruelty, pushed and probed into the extremes of experience and the concomitant extremes of expression; he pushed his actors further and further, urging them to break through their limitations. They responded eagerly. (Unlike Pearl Bailey a few years earlier when he was working with her. ‘We want a new Pearl Bailey,’ he had told that great lady. ‘Honey,’ she replied, ‘I ain’t through with the old one yet.’) The Artaud work then informed his remarkable productions for the RSC of The
Physicists and King Lear, and a startling version of Seneca’s Oedipus for the National Theatre. He also moved into the political arena with US, his response to the Vietnam War. The culmination of all this work was his overwhelming account of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, a tour de force of staging as well as perhaps the most advanced instance of company work ever seen in England. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was like an enormous whoop of joy after this sustained exploration of the dark.

  After Oedipus, a year earlier, he had written to his friend Stephen Facey, ‘with the first night of the new production, with an aggressive assertive penis to boot, I saw that one whole world was over and another one would have to take its place.’ Aged forty, he tells Facey that he now wants ‘to face inwards rather than outwards’. A little earlier than most of us; but then his period of enfance terrible lasted longer than most. At least he knew it was over. It is of the subsequent years that Kustow writes most brilliantly. The book warms up enormously as it goes on – as if the early Brook, the bobby-dazzler, was a little alien to Kustow, who documents his young stardom conscientiously but without enthusiasm. It is the later search that grips Kustow, the quest for new forms, new language, new relationships with unimagined audiences: the company at the Bouffes du Nord; the treks to Africa; the engagement with epic texts from ancient cultures. Sometimes Brook would assert his genius for staging – would become again, as Richard Findlater put it after Orghast at Persepolis, ‘the arch-magician, a self-renewing Prospero, with enough of Puck in him to change his staff in time before it is snapped by theory’ – but much of his work was directed towards defining a new kind of acting: ‘effortless transparency, an organic presence beyond self, mind or body such as great musicians attain when they pass beyond virtuosity’. He sought to inculcate the child’s approach to play in his actors: what he calls the ‘double image’, where the child pretends to be a character but is always him or herself. The work he produced under this dispensation has been often ravishing, illuminating, provocative; it has also often been somewhat mild in its effect. There would have been no place for an Olivier or a Scofield in these productions. The ‘hell of night and darkness’ that Kustow discerns in Brook’s early and middle work seems to have dissolved, along with the ‘deeply rooted aggression and anguish’ in his psyche. Perhaps it is not so much that they were within him, but that he had an exceptional ability to be the conduit of what was around him. Now, in his eighties, he seems less engaged, quite understandably, with the world about him, and more concerned with distilling the essentials of what he conceives theatre to be. Tynan quotes an exchange between Henry James and Max Beerbohm on the subject of one of William Poel’s ‘Spartan exercises in Elizabethan stagecraft’. ‘It’s all done with great economy of means,’ says Max. ‘And, ah, of effect,’ replies James.

  In the 1960s, Brook had demanded a neo-Elizabethan theatre ‘which passes from the world of action to the world of thought, from down-to-earth reality to the extreme of metaphysical enquiry without effort and without self-consciousness’. This is what we all long for; alas, Brook’s own work since he formulated the demand has not been able to satisfy it. But his has been an unique and a necessary voice, reminding us that the price of a truly alive theatre is perpetual vigilance. The theatre is so unsatisfactory: its potential is limitless, but what we produce is always disappointing to us. We all long for something other than what we actually achieve. Sometimes we seem to be on the brink of something extraordinary. Brook has come closer to that something than anyone in the twentieth century. Kustow quotes a remark by John Kane, Brook’s Puck, that comes as close as anything in an endlessly stimulating book to an explanation of what his contribution has been, both as artist and as elucidator: the RSC’s approach, says Kane, was that they ‘wanted to do things with the play’; Brook, on the other hand, ‘wanted the play to do things with us’. Here, as in many places in the book, Kustow, in his quiet sober way, ushers us into the potential magnitude of theatre.

  After its London season, the RSC would go off on world tours or back to Stratford, and the World Theatre Season would take its place. This annual phenomenon was somewhat dreaded by the management, partly because of the huge technical demands of the simultaneous translation system and the logistics of getting a different foreign company and its sets into the theatre every week, but mainly because it introduced into their theatre the irksome figure of the legendary one-armed impresario Peter Daubeny, who with immense flair and cunning lured the greatest theatre figures in the world (as well as some of the most obscure) to the Aldwych every year and with equal flair and cunning managed to upset them all. It may have been malice, it might have been eccentricity, or it could have been deliberate policy, but somehow – by a casual reference to a deadly rival, by a mispronounced or misremembered name, or by a conveniently forgotten financial arrangement – he kept them hopping. Press conferences were always especially prone to mishap: I once heard him introduce the great Italian actress Anna Magnani as Dame Anna Neagle, an actress of a quite different colour. Magnani looked bewildered as Peter swept on regardless. His translator-in-chief – a vital job in this theatrical Tower of Babel – was Binkie Beaumont’s former secretary, the multilingual Kitty Black, who was often to be found running sobbing through the foyer after some particularly savage onslaught from Peter, who would follow her, crowing triumphantly, the empty left sleeve of his jacket, inexpertly pinned to his chest, flapping, his eyes glinting madly.

  It was my job, as the box-office junior, to call him every night with the figure. Often he received the information with deep melancholy, as well he might have done – even when we were sold out, he never came close to breaking even, despite his heavy subsidy from the Observer newspaper. But I greatly enjoyed these nocturnal telephonic confessionals, with him talking eloquently about the vicissitudes of his extraordinary life, on and off the battlefield – or perhaps one should say battlefields, military and theatrical. I rather enjoyed his raffish manners – Denholm Elliott would have played him to perfection – and from an artistic point of view (at whatever loss to his personal fortune and to the Observer) he was providing me and the rest of London with an unimaginable banquet of acting and stagecraft. The Moscow Art Theatre, the Comédie Française, Eduardo de Filipo’s company, the Teatro Stabile di Genova, the Theatre on the Balustrade from Prague, the Schiller Theater, the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, Núria Espert, Ingmar Bergman’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, the Kathakali Theatre of India, each on the other’s heels – sublime productions, supreme performances. It was a seemingly unending pageant of greatness, waving a banner which said ‘This is what theatre can be.’

  I was by now permanently intoxicated with theatre, out of my brain on it. I saw seven plays a week (two on Saturday) and read every book I could find on acting, being especially inspired by Stanislavsky, Edward Gordon Craig, G. H. Lewes, Eric Bentley – author of that supreme masterpiece The Life of the Drama and editor of the still indispensable Pelican Theory of the Modern Stage – and Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy’s Actors on Acting. Meanwhile, I had found a drama school that I thought would suit me, the toughest one I could find, because I believed, correctly, that if I was to become an actor, some fairly significant adjustments, internal and external, needed to be made. What they were I was not sure; indeed I was not even sure what the problem was, but whatever it was that made me feel like lead when I stood on the stage of the DramSoc Hut in Belfast as Trigorin had to be identified and extirpated if I was ever to be an actor. It was from the Aldwych Theatre that I set out for the Drama Centre in Chalk Farm for my audition; what happened when I got there I’ve described elsewhere. The events of that day changed my life conclusively. I got in; six months later I showed up for the first day of term and for three years gave myself over wholly to its sometimes savage demands. The teaching was very much more than simply a craft training: its purpose was not simply to open us up, emotionally and physically (and God, I needed that) but to get our brains into our bodies. Thinking is at the heart of any art, in my view, but es
pecially the art of acting; and the three principals, John Blatchley, Christopher Fettes and Yat Malmgren, individually brilliant and each radically different from the other, pushed us to think far harder about what we were doing or trying to do than we had ever imagined when we innocently decided that we wanted to be actors. Yat was in some ways the most extraordinary of the three. I wrote his obituary for The Times in 2002.