Peter Brook's Tempest *

Peter Brook’s “experiment,” as it became known, was originally launched by Jean-Louis Barrault in Paris in May, 1968, under the auspices of the Théâtre des Nations, and later performed in London. Barrault had invited Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company to organize a company of international artists-actors, directors, scenic designers (including Joe Chaikin, Victor Garcia, and Geoffrey Reeves)—to examine and experiment with some fundamental questions in form: what is theatre, what is a play, what is the relationship of the actor to audience, and what are the conditions which serve all of them best? As a frame of reference for this research, Brook decided to work on ideas from The Tempest. The play appealed to Brook because, according to him, it had always appeared on the stage as something sentimental and pallid. Among other things, he wanted to “see whether The Tempest could help the actors find the power and violence that is in the play; whether they could find new ways of performing all the other elements which were normally presented in a very artificial way…and whether the actors could extend their range of work by using a play that demanded this extension.” ¹ But most important, Brook hoped that by commingling foreign artists, he could achieve a synthesis of style relevant to our times, which could obviate the conventional passivity of bourgeois audiences.