ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to relocate Brook’s work at a crossroads between cultures in order to shift Brook out of this elitist ghetto, a critical move that parallels Brook’s own decision to locate his theatre work in a multicultural, working-class area of Paris. In a 1992 article included in Patrice Pavis’ Intercultural Performance Reader, Brook outlines the contours of a “culture of links” to combat the fragmentation of the world. Brook’s exploration of a modernist approach to staging the play was at the same time an individual exploration of a European tradition of performance. Rearticulating Brook’s “culture of links” within a specifically European setting could further the search for greater democracy in Europe by interrogating its borders and emphasising multiple, rather than single, forms of cultural identification. The creation of some form of transnational understanding has been central to Brook’s recent theatrical productions of Shakespeare and is also central to the concerns of the “New” Europe.
