How do you think that Peter Brook has employed the ideas/techniques of the practitioners detailed in Mitter's study? With reference to Brook's own writings, particularly The Shifting Point.

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10119319                                                                DRA2001

How do you think that Peter Brook has employed the ideas/techniques of the practitioners detailed in Mitter’s study?  Please refer to Brook’s own writings, particularly The Shifting Point, in answering this question.

Peter Brook is one of the world’s most famous directors and has much in-depth knowledge and experience of the theatre.

Brook is a key figure in modern theatre, building on the innovations of earlier practitioners … and continuing that uniquely twentieth century institution, the director's theatre.”  (Halfyard, 2000:http://www.maxopus.com/essays/8songs_m.htm)

Brook is known as “the leading director of his generation” (Peter Hall) and he claims he can take any empty space and call it a bare stage, but where did he get his inspiration? Who are his influences?

In this essay, I am going to try and find any similarities between Brook’s theatre techniques and those of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski. I am looking for if he has more preference towards one of these directors or uses a combination of each of their rehearsal methods with his actors.

Shomit Mitter’s study, Systems of Rehearsal, looks at the process of rehearsal according to Brook, associating his rehearsal techniques with those created by Stanislavsky, Grotowski and Brecht. In Mitter’s introduction at first, I felt a sense of criticism towards Brook; “Brook seemed to me more a mimic than an inventor” (Mitter, 1992:30) and he mentions the extent of Brook’s ‘debt’ to each of the above directors. Although in the latter part of Mitter’s introduction, he goes on to say that it is ‘extraordinary’ how Brook showed such a likeness with such completely different directors:

I began to feel that his ability to absorb the influence of vastly dissimilar theatres could only be seen as an achievement.”   (Mitter, 1992:4)

In Brook’s study The Shifting Point, looking back on his career in theatre, he speaks about a misunderstanding that exists in theatre which is the assumption that theatrical process falls into two stages; the first: making, and the second: selling. Brook then shows disagreement with Stanislavsky:

…Even in the title of Stanislavsky’s great work Building a Character, this misunderstanding persists, implying that a character can be built up like a wall, until one day the last brick is laid and the character is complete. To my mind, it is just the opposite. I would say that the process consists not of two stages but of two phases. First: preparation. Second: birth. This is very different.”   (Brook, 1987:7)

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In one of the very few references to Stanislavsky in Brook’s book The Empty Space, Brook describes this same subject very briefly, explaining that “a character isn’t a static thing and it can’t be built like a wall.”   (Brook, 1968:114)

This emphasis on how he wants to shape his actors, prove that he wants his actors to be constantly learning, encountering new approaches to acting and experiencing different practical exercises within the rehearsal process.

Brook does not refer to Stanislavsky as often as I expected in both The Shifting Point and The Empty Space, whereas Mitter’s first chapter ...

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