Conversations with Peter Brook: 1970-2000

Peter Brook, Margaret Croyden

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781559363501
• eBook ISBN: 9781559366342
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

“A fascinating and provocatively stimulating distillation of three decades of intense conversations between one of the twentieth century’s few true theater innovators and America’s leading writer on the theatrical avant-garde. A splendid book.”—Clive Barnes

“Peter Brook continues to astonish, not in an ordinary, fashionable way, but in an ancient, insistent way that always forces one inward. There is a true, honest, fearless voice in this fascinating conversation.”—Ken Burns

Peter Brook, one of the most important contemporary theatrical directors in the West, shares his most insightful thoughts and deepest feelings about theater with Margaret Croyden, who has followed his career for thirty years, gaining an unparalleled perspective on the evolution of his work. In these interchanges from 1970 to 2000, Brook freely discusses major works such as his landmark airborne A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his untraditional interpretation of the opera La Tragédie de Carmen. He also covers the establishment of the Paris Center, his work in the Middle East and Africa, and his masterwork, the nine-hour production of The Mahabharata, which has virtually reinvented the way actors and directors think about theater.

Margaret Croyden is a well-known critic, commentator, and journalist, whose articles on theater and the arts have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Village Voice, American Theatre, and Antioch Review, among others. She is the author of Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, a seminal book on the development of nonliterary theater.

Six

Meetings with Remarkable Men

In 1978, the unpredictable Peter Brook, already famous for his groundbreaking productions as well as his experiments with his international group in France, Africa, and Asia, now turned to filmmaking on an epic scale. Brook had worked in film before—Lord of the Flies, Marat/Sade, and King Lear, for example—but never on as grand or as unconventional an undertaking as this effort, which recounts nothing less than a philosophical quest for meaning in life.

The film, Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), depicts the youthful odyssey of an early twentieth-century philosopher and spiritual master, the Greek-Armenian G. I. Gurdjieff, whose ideas about reaching a higher consciousness, ideas largely unknown except to a few devotees, were attracting wider attention at a time when such movements as transcendental meditation and such religions as Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism were appealing to people from all walks of life. Long before variations of these Eastern-based movements became popular in the West, Gurdjieff combined Eastern philosophy and practices with Western ways to create his own spiritual discipline.

Based on Gurdjieff’s autobiography, Brook’s film tells the story of a young boy who grows up in a provincial town in the Caucasus at the end of the nineteenth century, wonders about the significance of life, and, unsatisfied by the traditional beliefs of his elders, sets out on a journey through the Middle East and Central Asia in search of better answers. On the way, he meets and befriends other “searchers,” all of whom are remarkable men—hence the film’s title—with whom he undergoes various adventures, each bringing him closer to his goal, as well as teaching him a practical and spiritual way of life.

The film was shot mainly on location in the plains, mountains, and deserts of Afghanistan, with an international cast and crew of sixty. Yugoslav actor Dragan Maksimovic played the young Gurdjieff; Athol Fugard, the South African playwright; and the actor Terence Stamp also had important roles. And codirector with Brook was one of the few living students of Gurdjieff, Mme. Jeanne de Salzmann, with whom Mr. Brook adapted the scenario from Gurdjieff’s book of the same title. A Frenchwoman, Madame de Salzmann, together with her late husband and others, had helped Gurdjieff settle in France and establish an institute there in the 1920s. She was a key figure among the artists, intellectuals, and scholars for whom Gurdjieff became a spiritual teacher during the following two decades. Since his death in 1949, she has been instrumental in perpetuating his ideas.

Gurdjieff believed that, psychologically speaking, the average person lives and dies in “sleep,” without questioning the meaning of life; that one’s “energy centers”—intellectual, emotional, and instinctual—are disconnected from one another. But he believed in the possibility of one achieving harmony of mind, body, and feeling by working with various disciplines to become “awake.” To this end, he developed a complex system of thought, including a comprehensive cosmology and metaphysics, and a theory about the process of evolution in individual man.

Gurdjieff believed that Western man as he was could not change his own consciousness, despite being armed with precise scientific knowledge and the latest methods of investigation. “Everything is just the same as it was thousands of years ago,” he told P. D. Ouspensky, his first disciple, who related it in his book In Search of the Miraculous. “The outward form changes. The essence does not change. Man remains the same. Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words. But all these words about ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ are merely words.”

As people are “asleep”—living a routine, habit-filled existence—they cannot find their true essence, the real and permanent “I” (or soul). We are machines, Gurdjieff said, victims of the many divided, illusionary “I’s” that distract and enslave us (the “I” that feels one way and the “I” that acts another). But once awake, in Gurdjieff’s view, we learn to develop the real and permanent “I” that reorders and unifies the psychic functions.

Gurdjieff’s central aim was self-transformation through mindfulness, self-awareness, and self-observation—the primary steps in awakening. According to Ouspensky, Gurdjieff stressed method, process, and the practical side of transformation—known as the Fourth Way, and distinguished from the three others: the way of the fakir, which concentrates on the body alone; the way of the monk, on feeling; and the way of the yogi, on the mind. Unlike other traditions, the Fourth Way requires no commitment to a guru, saint, or idol, or adherence to ritual, and can be practiced in a temple, an ashram, or a commune. Practitioners need not give up home, job, or family, or eat certain foods and abstain from others.

The “awakening process,” the “Work”—the name given to the Gurdjieff teaching—is actual work on oneself every day in one’s own environment or in a group with other Gurdjieff followers. Most important are the “movements,” or sacred dances—a set of rhythmic dances or physical stances designed to liberate the energies of the body. They involve hundreds of complicated postures and asymmetrical movements, each of which aims to elicit a certain state or awareness of one’s own body rhythms—which contribute to a subtle change of consciousness. The language of the body—which Gurdjieff developed long before it became a popular concept—was one of the means toward the harmonious development of the whole person.

Brook saw in the Gurdjieff story and in the man’s quest the kind of hero and heroics of which good drama is made. In no way did he want the film to be esoteric, and he concentrated on the theatrical elements of Gurdjieff’s life, rather than on his philosophy. Nevertheless, the film does give one an inkling of Gurdjieff the searcher, and shows, however subtly, what Gurdjieff was looking for—clearly expressed in the filming of the “movements,” which were seen by a large public for the first time in the Peter Brook film.

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Q:

You said in an interview that you wanted to film a man and his search and also explore his story as heroic. Many people might fit that picture. Why have you chosen G. I. Gurdjieff, a man whom very few people have heard of?

PB:

It’s no different from saying to me, “Why did you want to do King Lear? You could have done Othello.” Any artist has to try to be as little subjective as he can, knowing that he’s totally subjective. You can be more self-indulgent with your subjectivity, or less self-indulgent; there is a certain margin between the two. Just to give oneself wantonly to all one’s own hunches, fantasies, dreams, and fears doesn’t interest me greatly. The opposite road is accepting everything one does as personal, prejudiced, biased, and subjective, but, at the same time, finding some objective value that can be shared with other people. So why did I prefer at a certain moment of my life to commit to King Lear rather than to Othello? It is subjective fact. Yes, I preferred it. I liked it. I was drawn to it. If a Hollywood producer brought me twenty books and twenty scripts and told me that I had a choice of doing films about various searchers, I would go toward Gurdjieff for reasons that are personal and not personal. The two come together. I believe that among them all, he is the most interesting, the most immediate, the most valid, the most totally representative, the most particular.

Q:

Well, what makes him more representative than doing a film, say, about a Zen master? What about Gurdjieff interests you more than Zen?

PB:

Ah. There I think you touch on something enormously interesting. Perhaps more than anyone, Gurdjieff built the bridges between something out of everyday life and something right in everyday life. Although Gurdjieff was half European—Greek—and half Armenian, and spent a lot of time in the East, he had nothing of the exotic Eastern mystic about him. If he had this at all, it was because of false, uninformed legend. Gurdjieff was constantly searching within himself (and for the people with whom he worked) for links between levels of inaccessible experience and the levels of experience that were one’s own—the way one lived. He brought something—found only in monasteries—into what we call life. For him, that life was life in the West. Gurdjieff made the link between something that was developed and preserved only in the East and something that today is possible only in the West.

Q:

Didn’t Zen Buddhism try to make the same link between East and West?

PB:

To me, there are two Zens: the real Zen and the joke Zen. Real Zen is the Zen monastery, and its master and pupils in Japan, which, again with rare exceptions, are all Japanese and encompass the Japanese psyche, the Japanese organism within the Japanese culture, and the Japanese way of life. There is always the exception that crosses the barrier, but it’s always the Japanese. And then there’s the joke Zen, which has nothing to do with this superb and rigorous and extraordinary monastic life in Japan. The joke Zen comes from picking pieces of Zen out of paperback books in New York drugstores, p...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• One - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Two - The Beginnings of the International Center of Theater Research
• Three - In the Hills of Iran: Orghast
• Four - Experiments at the Center
• Five - Experiments in Africa
• Six - Meetings with Remarkable Men
• Seven - Antony and Cleopatra
• Eight - The Ik, Ubu, The Conference of the Birds
• Nine - La Tragédie de Carmen
• Ten - The Mahabharata
• Eleven - The Tempest
• Twelve - The Man Who
• Thirteen - The Tragedy of Hamlet
• Fourteen - Looking Back
• Acknowledgments
• A Note from the Author
• Selected Chronology
• Copyright Page