The Empty Space

Name: The Empty Space
Author: Peter Brook
ISBN: 0689705581

by Peter Brook

It was published in 1968 and it’s almost never been out of print since. It’s a very slim book – my well-thumbed edition runs to 157 pages. What Peter Brook does is apply his very cool, analytical judgment to theatre as it is. He breaks theatre down into four different categories – and these terms have now become standard. The ‘deadly theatre’, first of all. The theatre of mechanical repetition, mainly in commercial theatre, where productions can run for ten or 20 years. This is the theatre that happens because it’s scheduled to happen, and there’s no particular inspiration behind it. Then he comes to the ‘holy theatre’, by which he’s referring to a rather cultish, specialised, refined, avant-garde theatre created by dedicated individuals, that has an aura of sacrament about it, but is slightly removed from the daily world. So this might include Polish theatre companies like Grotowski’s, who worked in isolation in a secluded Polish forest, leading quite a monastic existence away from daily life. Then there is the ‘rough theatre’, which embraces vaudeville, music hall, comedy, popular entertainment – and has all the rough vitality we associate with that. But what he’s looking for is a synthesis of the holy and the rough, in what he calls the ‘immediate theatre’. This is theatre where idealism and spirituality is combined with an ability to reach out to an audience. Brook finds that Shakespeare is the best example of ‘immediate theatre’, because any Shakespeare play combines these ingredients in the most extraordinary way. And I think the book is a reflection of Peter Brook himself. He is a man who has an extraordinary mixture of the pragmatic and the spiritual – something he’s always seeking in his own work. I’ve just seen a wonderful production he’s done of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He’s called it A Magic Flute, and pared it down to 90 minutes, cutting out a lot of what he sees as peripheral stuff. But there’s one moment in it that sums up Brook’s whole immediate theatre philosophy. It’s when the heroine has just sung a tragic aria because her lover has not recognised her and she thinks she’s lost him. So she sings this death-haunted aria in which she assumes she’s going to kill herself at the end. Meanwhile onstage is the character Papageno, who, in Brook’s production, is busy munching a sausage. So you’ve got a woman who’s singing about death, while you simultaneously have a low-class character who’s busy stuffing his face with food. That’s a good illustration of the immediate theatre. But I think one reason why this book resonates is that things we take for granted now – that theatre should be a shared experience, that it should be communal – were things that Brook was writing about with great clarity in 1968. Take the first paragraph of the book, for instance: ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.’ So what Brook is saying is a room, a space – that is the essential theatre. And of course, we’ve now all seen countless productions where that kind of minimalism is regarded as standard. Most fringe companies operate on that principle. And what is interesting is the way that empty space concept has affected mainstream theatre. Brook changed the way we look at theatre by saying, let’s strip away some of the formalities and see what the essence of theatre is. This book was an art-changing book. There’s a marvellous passage where Brook talks about being in New York and seeing young people queuing up at the Museum of Modern Art, paying next to nothing to get in. He looks at those people and thinks, ‘Why are they queuing up for a gallery but not theatre?’ He concludes we have to make theatre not just simpler in style but also cheaper, and so more accessible. We have to find a way of discovering and encouraging that new audience. I think it’s a lesson theatre has learnt – every organisation I know is breaking its back at the moment to find ways of getting a new audience in. As a director Brook is a pioneer, and what he’s done in this book is to set out fundamental questions and principles, asking what is the act of theatre, why do we continue with it, what can it offer us that other mediums can’t? And I think the questions are ones we’re still debating today. So it’s still an essential book.

Recommended by

Michael Billington

"It was published in 1968 and it’s almost never been out of print since. It’s a very slim book – my well-thumbed edition runs to 157 pages. What Peter Brook does is apply his very cool, analytical judgment to theatre as it is. He breaks theatre down into four different categories – and these terms have now become standard. The ‘deadly theatre’, first of all. The theatre of mechanical repetition, mainly in commercial theatre, where productions can run for ten or 20 years. This is the theatre that happens because it’s scheduled to happen, and there’s no particular inspiration behind it. Then he comes to the ‘holy theatre’, by which he’s referring to a rather cultish, specialised, refined, avant-garde theatre created by dedicated individuals, that has an aura of sacrament about it, but is slightly removed from the daily world. So this might include Polish theatre companies like Grotowski’s, who worked in isolation in a secluded Polish forest, leading quite a monastic existence away from daily life. Then there is the ‘rough theatre’, which embraces vaudeville, music hall, comedy, popular entertainment – and has all the rough vitality we associate with that. But what he’s looking for is a synthesis of the holy and the rough, in what he calls the ‘immediate theatre’. This is theatre where idealism and spirituality is combined with an ability to reach out to an audience. Brook finds that Shakespeare is the best example of ‘immediate theatre’, because any Shakespeare play combines these ingredients in the most extraordinary way. And I think the book is a reflection of Peter Brook himself. He is a man who has an extraordinary mixture of the pragmatic and the spiritual – something he’s always seeking in his own work. I’ve just seen a wonderful production he’s done of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He’s called it A Magic Flute, and pared it down to 90 minutes, cutting out a lot of what he sees as peripheral stuff. But there’s one moment in it that sums up Brook’s whole immediate theatre philosophy. It’s when the heroine has just sung a tragic aria because her lover has not recognised her and she thinks she’s lost him. So she sings this death-haunted aria in which she assumes she’s going to kill herself at the end. Meanwhile onstage is the character Papageno, who, in Brook’s production, is busy munching a sausage. So you’ve got a woman who’s singing about death, while you simultaneously have a low-class character who’s busy stuffing his face with food. That’s a good illustration of the immediate theatre. But I think one reason why this book resonates is that things we take for granted now – that theatre should be a shared experience, that it should be communal – were things that Brook was writing about with great clarity in 1968. Take the first paragraph of the book, for instance: ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.’ So what Brook is saying is a room, a space – that is the essential theatre. And of course, we’ve now all seen countless productions where that kind of minimalism is regarded as standard. Most fringe companies operate on that principle. And what is interesting is the way that empty space concept has affected mainstream theatre. Brook changed the way we look at theatre by saying, let’s strip away some of the formalities and see what the essence of theatre is. This book was an art-changing book. There’s a marvellous passage where Brook talks about being in New York and seeing young people queuing up at the Museum of Modern Art, paying next to nothing to get in. He looks at those people and thinks, ‘Why are they queuing up for a gallery but not theatre?’ He concludes we have to make theatre not just simpler in style but also cheaper, and so more accessible. We have to find a way of discovering and encouraging that new audience. I think it’s a lesson theatre has learnt – every organisation I know is breaking its back at the moment to find ways of getting a new audience in. As a director Brook is a pioneer, and what he’s done in this book is to set out fundamental questions and principles, asking what is the act of theatre, why do we continue with it, what can it offer us that other mediums can’t? And I think the questions are ones we’re still debating today. So it’s still an essential book."

20th Century Theatre · fivebooks.com