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‘A Place Marked by Life’: Brook at the Bouffes du Nord

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

David Williams
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Abstract

After his experimental work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which bore fruit in the production of Marat/Sade in 1964 and culminated in the controversial Vietnam play US in 1966, Peter Brook returned to the classical repertoire in which he had made his name as ‘enfant terrible’ of British theatre, with Seneca's Oedipus for the National Theatre in 1968, and, two years later, A Midsummer Night's Dream for the RSC. But the very success of ‘Brook's Dream’ – the way in which its transformation into an ‘event’ required actors ‘to do their duty rather than what came from life’ – heightened Brook's sense that he could no longer work creatively under such conditions, and in 1970 he formed his Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale, which developed its early work for the Persepolis festivals and in the treks across Africa chronicled by John Heilpern in Conference of the Birds. Eventually the company settled in Paris at the Théâtre aux Bouffes du Nord in 1974: but while their work there has been widely acclaimed, it has been subjected to little detailed analysis in English. In the original series of TQ, Kenneth Tynan offered a highly critical view in TQ25. Here, David Williams – a graduate of the Drama Department of the University of Kent, currently working in community theatre at Hoxton Hall in London's East End – corrects the balance with a full descriptive analysis of Brook's major productions at the Bouffes – Timon of Athens. The Ik, a conflation of Jarry's Ubu plays, and a re-creation of the Conference of the Birds

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , February 1985 , pp. 39 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

Notes and References

1. Brook on BBC Radio in 1950, quoted in Trewin, J. C., Peter Brook: a Biography (London: Macdonald, 1971), p. 55Google Scholar.

2. For full discussion of these journeys, see Smith, A. C. H., Orghast at Persepolis (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972)Google Scholar; Heilpern, John, Conference of the Birds: the Story of Peter Brook in Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)Google Scholar; Wilson, Peter, Sessions in USA: a Chronicle (Paris: CIRT, unpublished, 1973)Google Scholar; and Williams, David, unpublished M. A. thesis, University of Kent, Theatre of Innocence and of Experience: Peter Brook, 1964–1980 (1983)Google Scholar.

3. For full history, see postface of CICT text of Ubu aux Bouffes (Paris, 1977), an extract from a history of Paris theatres by Philippe Chauveau.

4. Jean-Claude Carrière's CICT Timon d' Athènes (Paris, 1978), p. 61.

5. Schneider, Pierre, New York Times, 3 12 1974Google Scholar.

6. Timon d' Athènes (Paris, 1978), p. 13.

7. Brook at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (workshop sessions recorded and transcribed by Sally Gardner), September/October 1973 (unpublished).

8. Brook In Billington, Michael, ‘Written on the Wind: the Dramatic Art of Peter Brook’, The Listener, 21 and 28 12 1978, p. 849Google Scholar.

9. Mann, Thomas, Dr Faustus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), p. 322Google Scholar.

10. Brook, Peter, ‘Lettre à une Etudiante Anglaise’, in Timon d' Athènes (Paris, 1978), p. 7Google Scholar. The tenth arrondissement of Paris is predominantly immigrant working class. Brook has attempted to open up his theatre to the community by staging free Christmas shows and open days for local people and their children. The group has also taken work into local schools, foyers, hospitals, prisons.

11. Jean-Claude Carrière has been Brook's writer on all of the CICT productions, writing and rewriting texts in close collaboration with both Brook and the actors. He was one of France's leading screenwriters of the 1960s and 1970s, noted above all for his work with Luis Buñuel, including Le Journal d' une Femme de Chambre (1964), Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972), and Cet Obscur Objet du Désir (1977). Carrieère's experiences in cinema have proved invaluable in scripting works coherent to Brook's ‘anti-aesthetic’ of dynamic montage, prismatic discontinuity, mobility, and immediacy of thought and image – the very qualities he so much admires in the Elizabethan theatre. The broken line of narrative development and the element of surprise in Buñuel's brand of surrealism come close to Brook's stylistic ideals. Compare this process of stripping down with Brook's recent La Tragédie de Carmen (1981): editing Bizet and returning to Mérimée to free the encrusted classic, its dormant inner life released through a process of condensation and compression: 80-minute performance, small (fifteen piece) orchestra, no chorus, only four singers, two actors; whatever was deemed unnecessary was suppressed. The economy and simplicity of the whole (coupled with an emphasis on Carmen's feline sensuality and the vigorously physical acting style) invested the performance with a resonant immediacy and presence. A renewed Carmen meant a young, dynamic cast; their direct communication of the energy of love and passion realized the tragic myth.

12. Brook, Peter, The Times, 18 10 1978Google Scholar.

13. Kott, Jan, Shakespeare our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 282Google Scholar.

14. New York Times, 10 Aug. 1975.

15. , Brook in Geoffrey Reeves, ‘The Persepolis Follies of 1971’, Performance, Vol. I, No. 1 (New York Shakespeare Public Theatre, 1971), p. 69Google Scholar.

16. New York Times, 10 Aug. 1975.

17. Schneider, Pierre, New York Times, 3 12 1974Google Scholar.

18. For details, see Les Voies De La Création Théâtrale, Vol. 5 (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1977), pp. 52–7.

19. , Brook, New York Times, 10 08. 1975Google Scholar.

20. Timon d'Athénes (Paris, 1978), p. 109.

21. For Jung, the mandala was an externalized symbolic expression of a harmonious ‘coincidencia oppositorum’, manifesting the reconciliation of contrary impulses and tendencies in full integration. In Memories, Dreams and Reflections (London: Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1977, p. 221), he describes the daily mandala sketches he made to reflect his inner state: ‘Out of this irritation and disharmony within myself there proceeded, the following day, a changed mandala; part of the periphery had burst open and the symmetry was destroyed. Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: “Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation”. And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well is harmonious, and which cannot tolerate self-deceptions.’

22. Timon d' Athénes (Paris, 1978), p. 17.

23. In New York Times, 10 Aug. 1975, Brook compares the situation in Timon to that existing in present-day urban Paris. Perhaps it is valid to link Malik as Apémantus with the vast numbers of immigrant African workers to be seen on the streets of Paris? His costume was a tramp-like mixture of second-hand jumble: dirty old raincoat, crumpled felt hat, elbowless donkey jacket, and boots.

24. See Banu's, Georges excellent analysis of Timon, ‘Timon d' Athénes de Shakespeare, et sa mise en scéne par Peter Brook’, in Les Voies de la Création Théâtrale, Vol. 5 (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1977)Google Scholar. Compare Brook's realization of what he sees as Shakespeare's ‘realism of relationships’, and Meyerhold: ‘The stylized theatre employs statuesque plasticity to strengthen the impression made by certain groupings on the spectator's memory, so that the fatal notes of tragedy sound through the spoken dialogue’ (quoted in Braun, Edward, Meyerhold on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 63)Google Scholar.

25. , Brookin Timon d'Athénes (Paris, 1978), p. 109Google Scholar.

26. Brook in Billington, op. cit., p. 849.

27. , Brook, The Empty Space (Penguin, 1968), p. 114Google Scholar.

28. Knowledge of the nature of the space leads to experimentation and reassessment, and thence to the destruction of falsifying, deadening tradition. Thus, in Carmen it was felt that the need to forge an intimate, natural relationship between music, image, and action was of the utmost importance; music was just one element in the drama. Directness was achieved through a reappraisal of the conventional singer/orchestra/spectator relationship. The orchestra was split into two at the back of the space; in this way, the musicians could participate more fully, were able to see the action and be seen; in addition the space was filled with stereophonic sound, amplified by the back wall, yet never drowning the action or the singers' intimate passages; music and song were different elements complementing each other. The redefinition of the convention according to which the singers are dependent upon the conductor, relating action solely to music, led to a quite remarkable increase in the vitality and humanity of the work as a whole.

29. In June 1957, Jan Kott had seen Brook's Titus Andronicus in Warsaw. He described the performance in terms of the Shakespearian theatre seen through film experiences: ‘the scenes are composed like film shots and follow each other like film sequences’ (Jan Kott, op. cit., p. 283). He goes on to suggest that ‘like a film director, Shakespeare makes frequent use of close-ups’ – i.e., in soliloquies, dramatic meetings, etc., when the poetry has the effect of simultaneously condensing and magnifying, as in both close-up and deep focus. Arguably Brook reached the culmination of his synthesis of theatre and film techniques in this production (e.g., close-up: Apémantus's proximity as he comments on the action behind him; montage, fade: episodic structure, dynamic of the whole).

30. For this reason, Michael Billington has referred to Brook as ‘the Gregg Toland of theatre’, in ‘From Artaud to Brook and Back Again’, The Guardian, 6 Jan. 1976.

31. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 211.

32. Gloucester in King Lear, IV, vi. Compare Les lks and Tynan's description of Brook's RSC King Lear (Stratford, 1962), a representation of a Beckettian universe of amoral indifference, a grotesque metaphysical farce in which tiny human figures appeared deserted, vulnerable, oppressed by the bleak emptiness and elemental severity of the space – ‘kneeling, grovelling, stumbling, squirming, wriggling about like worms, forced into graceless postures, slumped in the stocks, or shoved on their backs to be tortured’.

33. Hughes, Ted, introduction to Selected Poems of Janòs Pilinszky (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1977), p. 9Google Scholar.

34. Lahr, John, ‘Knowing what to Celebrate’, Plays and Players, Vol. 23, No. 6 (03 1976), p. 17Google Scholar.

35. Les Lks (Paris: CICT, 1975), p. 37.

36. Turnbull, Colin, The Mountain People (London: Picador, 1974), p. 238Google Scholar.

37. , Brook, in Les lks (Paris: CICT, 1975), p. 97Google Scholar.

38. , Brook, in The Sunday Times, 4 01. 1976Google Scholar.

39. Times Literary Supplement, 8 Feb. 1974, p. 131.

40. , Brook, in Michael Billington, ‘Written on the Wind: the Dramatic Art of Peter Brook’, The Listener, 21 and 28 12 1978, p. 849Google Scholar.

41. , Brook, in Daily Telegraph, 20 01 1975Google Scholar.

42. Quoted in Sontag's, SusanOn Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 65Google Scholar.

43. See David Williams, op. cit.

44. Brook, in Billington, op. cit., p. 849. Compare a similar process in the work on madness in the Marat/Sade rehearsal period (1964). Whereas in the Marat/Sade the actor had been forced to dig the insanity out from within himself, here the actor needed to discover and uncover his own Ik-ness. The movement in Marat/Sade was from emotional imitation to psychodramatic externalization of the physical manifestations of insanity; in Les Iks, from imitation of external physiology to inner, subliminal experiencing and understanding of an Ik state.

45. , Brook, ‘From Zero to the Infinite’, Encore, November 1960Google Scholar; quoted in The Encore Reader: a Chronicle of the New Drama, ed. Marowitz, Charles, Milne, Tom, Hale, Owen (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 249Google Scholar.

46. Ibid, p. 250.

47. Ibid, p. 248.

48. Ibid, p. 249.

49. Ibid, p. 248.

50. For full discussion of Marat/Sade, see David Williams, op. cit., pp. 17–26.

51. Brook, ‘From Zero to the Infinite’, op. cit., p. 250.

52. Quoted in Steiner, George, Language and Silence (Penguin, 1979), p. 288Google Scholar.

53. Brook, in John Lahr, op. cit., p. 18.

54. Fischer, Emst, The Necessity of Art: a Marxist Approach (Penguin, 1963), p. 48Google Scholar.

55. Colin Tumbull, op. cit., p. 112.

56. ‘Director as Misanthropist: on the Moral Neutrality of Peter Brook’, Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 25 (Spring 1977), p. 24.

57. , Brook, ‘Filming a Masterpiece’, The Observer, 26 07 1964Google Scholar.

58. See, for example Trussler's, Simon editorial in Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 21 (Spring 1976), p. 3Google Scholar.

59. Wardle, Irving, The Times, 16 01 1976Google Scholar.

60. Compare the similar problem Susan Sontag sees at the heart of photography, which may lead through a parallel process to ‘a promiscuous acceptance of the world’ (op. cit., p. 81). The passivity of the spectator's relationship to theatrical act/photograph, coupled with the aestheticizing tendency of theatrical space/photograph, may encourage the development of a ‘chronic voyeuristic relation to the world, which levels the meaning of all events’ (ibid, p. 11). Also compare Brook's description of the validity of Jeanne Moreau's performance in Moderate Cantabile as being in the fact that she was ‘at that very moment experiencing something which therefore becomes interesting to look at as an object’ (, Brook, in Sight and Sound, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Summer 1963), p. 112)Google Scholar. Yet in his theatre work he has constantly struggled to find a way of heightening the spectator's involvement, of turning passive voyeurism into active participation on an imaginative level, through open suggestion rather than closed statement.

61. Emst Fischer, op. cit., p. 75.

62. Susan Sontag, op. cit., p. 12.

63. New York Times, 4 May 1980.

64. , Brook, in ‘Leaning on the Moment: a Conversation with Peter Brook’, Parabola, Vol. 4, Part 2 (Spring 1979), p. 50Google Scholar.

65. The implication of positive in negative was clarified in 1980 when the group took part in the Eleventh Adelaide International Arts Festival in Australia, performing the three major works, Ubu, Les Iks, and Conférence. Immediately after the Festival, the same plays were taken to La Mama, New York, for a three-week residence. On the final day (15 June) all three were presented as a continuous sequence, a clear statement of the relationships of the parts to the whole, as well as a sort of summation of the work to date. Here was a body of work to be considered together, each play a part of the whole. As Brook told Margaret Croyden: ‘it is really only one three-part play’ (New York Times, 4 May 1980). As a trilogy the three plays form a lucid expression of the group's social and ethical concerns. Typically Brook chose to define all three as live theatre in terms of celebration: the ‘pure, rough, crude energy’ of Ubu expresses the actors' ‘celebration of energy’. The heightened naturalism of Les Iks is a ‘celebration of detail’, and finally the intercultural significance and accessibility of Conférence are seen as a ‘celebration of the possibility of crossing barriers’.

66. Yeats, W. B., Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 349Google Scholar.

67. Brook, The Empty Space, p. 77.

68. See Tout Ubu, ed. Saillet, Maurice (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1962), p. 153Google Scholar.

69. Meyerhold, in Edward Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 137.

70. See Brook, The Empty Space, pp. 73 ff.

71. Ibid, pp. 74–5.

72. Ibid, p. 77.

73. Ibid, p. 76. In The Empty Space, Brook suggests that the greatest exponent of Jarryesque rough theatre today is Spike Milligan, in whose best work ‘the imagination, freed by anarchy, flies like a wild bat in and out of every possible shape and style’ (p. 77). It is worthy of note that Milligan had originally been commissioned by Brook to write an adaptation of the Ubu plays for the CICT to perform in English-speaking countries; unfortunately the project fell through. However, Milligan's Ubu was later produced at the Open Space Theatre, London (June 1980), directed by Charles Marowitz, with Charlie Drake as Fred Ubu and Claire Davenport as Gladys Ubu.

74. Jarry, in Tout Ubu, p. 23.

75. , Brook, in New York Times, 4 05 1980Google Scholar.

76. Brook, The Empty Space, p. 79.

77. , Brook, in New York Times, 4 05 1980Google Scholar.

78. Brook, The Empty Space, p. 75.

79. Ibid.

80. See Brook, ‘Théâtre Populaire, Théâtre Immédiat’, in he Monde, 24 Nov. 1977: ‘making a work accessible does not mean reducing its content, showing its surface only, which would involve deforming it’ – instead it means bringing into light ‘its hidden side, its complexity’, and making the truth at its heart immediate. ‘A generalization is never interesting. The universal theme becomes burning, vital, once it is concretized for us in the space that very evening.’

81. This lesser-known play is a rather laborious and childishly contrived representation of the identity of opposites, drawn from Jarry's theory of ‘pataphysics’, ‘the science of imaginary solutions’. It is constructed on a principle of contradiction, here, of freedom and slavery. Ubu shows that slavery can be a superior form of tyranny. Individualism becomes conformity; instead of being at liberty to indulge his appetites and instincts, he literally becomes slave to them. Thus the two halves of the performance are complementary. The authoritarian atrocities of the world of Ubu the king become the anarchic inanities of the naïvely revolutionary world of Ubu the slave.

82. Brook in the CICT programme for Ubu aux Bouffes, p. 9.

83. Artaud, Antonin, Collected Works, Vol. 4 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1974), p. 29Google Scholar.

84. Brook, The Empty Space, p. 80.

85. This scene contains a number of complex echoes and puns. As Evelyne Ertel points out (‘De Briques…et de Broc’, Travail Théâtral, No. 30 (January/March 1978), p. 132), ‘bouffer des briques’ (literally, ‘to eat bricks’) is a popular French expression meaning ‘to have nothing to eat’; the cliché is invested with new life through a comic process of literal concretization. The performance's very title Ubu aux Bouffes suggests a similar series of puns. From the Italian ‘buffo’, French takes ‘les bouffes’, meaning a ‘théâtre a l'italienne’. It also contains a reference to the importance of the stomach: ‘la bouffe’ (‘nosh’) suggests gluttony and excess. During the dining scene, the pun can be endlessly extended: at the end of the scene, Ubu becomes ‘bouffi de rage’ (enraged), as a result ‘il bouffe le nez aux autres’ (he attacks his guests), etc.

86. This production was the beginning of Brook's collaboration with the remarkable Japanese multi-instrumentalist Toshi Tsuchitori, whose work has become an integral part of the CICT. His contribution to this production (and subsequently to L'Os and Conférence) is inestimable. Always visible, like the musicians of oriental theatre, his accompaniment is improvised from the actors' work: he never imposes sound or rhythm onto the action, instead sensitively creating worlds for the actors to explore, gleefully playing with them. His work invites an active imaginative response from an audience, as well as being a means of heightening emotional involvement through its sensory, physical aspects. For example, in one scene in Ubu, Mére Ubu treads warily through the ‘dark’ vaults of the Warsaw cathedral crypt (darkness is established in the brightly lit space by Michele Collison's gropings, sheltering a candle in her hand). Through sound, Toshi comically suggested slamming doors, the flight of bats, unspecified monstrous insect life, and so on. His work not only adds depth and texture to the actors' (both punctuating and sustaining narrative dynamic), it makes the invisible visible.

87. Brook, The Empty Space, p. 78.

88. Ibid, pp. 89–90.

89. La Conférence des Oiseaux (CICT, 1979), p. 15.

90. Performed in 1970 in and around Paris; for a fuller discussion, see David Williams, op. cit., pp. 124 ff.

91. , Brook, in ‘Lie and Glorious Adjective’, Parabola, Vol. 6, Part 3 (08 1981), p. 64Google Scholar.

92. Ibid, p. 61.

93. Ibid, p. 62.

94. Ibid, p. 63.

95. Ibid, p. 62.

96. La Huppe, in La Conférence des Oiseaux, p. 31.

97. Brook, in ‘Lie and Glorious Adjective’, p. 63.

98. Ibid, p. 63.

99. Compare the other birds encountered once the journey is under way, who are similarly earthbound, or can only struggle to fly, the very anthithesis of the travellers at that point – Jean-Claude Perrin's solitary sparrow walking aimlessly in the desert, hunched painfully over his stick, or Tapa Sudana's extraordinary bat, his featherlessness (conveyed in the French ‘chauve-souris’) made concrete in the literal nakedness of the actor's torso, and his attempts at flight represented by the rapid and noisy opening and shutting of a battered and ragged umbrella, a grotesque illustration of his ruinous state and loss of self-respect. Both are lost, without a guide or a sense to their search and existence: removed from all community, they are ripped from themselves, alone and denatured like the Ik; they lack the serenity, unity and liberation offered by the possibility of true flight.

100. Brook's own role in the work of the Centre: ‘In a sense, the director is always an impostor, a guide at night who does not know the territory, and yet has no choice – he must guide learning the route as he goes’ (The Empty Space, pp. 43–4). Also: ‘Without leadership, a group cannot reach a coherent result within a given time. A director is not free of responsibility – he is totally responsible – but he is not free of the process either, he is part of it’ (ibid, p. 122).

101. La Conférence des Oiseaux, p. 10.

102. La Huppe, in La Conférence des Oiseaux, p. 69.

103. See The Conference of the Birds, Translated By Nott, C. S. from de Tassy's early French version (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 104Google Scholar.

104. See David Williams, op. cit., pp. 142–82.

105. La Conférence des Oiseaux, p. 73.