Notes from Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, 1968
Peter Brook
The Empty Space
1.The Deadly Theatre
p. 15 ‘A word does not start as a word – it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which dictates the need for expression. This process occurs inside the dramatist; it is repeated inside the actor…the only way to find the true path to the speaking of the word is through a process that parallels the original creative one.’
p 16 ‘It is vain to pretend that the words we apply to classical plays…have any absolute meaning. They are the reflections of a critical attitude of a particular period. And to attempt to build a performance today to conform to these canons is the most certain road to deadly theatre – deadly theatre of a respectability that makes it pass as a living truth.’
P17. ‘This is the running problem of what we loosely call style. Every work has its own style; it could not be otherwise: every period has its style. The moment we try to pinpoint this style we are lost. I remember vividly when shortly after the Pekin Opera had come to London a rival Chinese Opera Company followed, from Formosa. The Pekin Company was still in touch with its sources and creating its ancient patterns afresh each night: the Formosan company, doing the same items, was imitating its memories of them, skimping some details, exaggerating the showy passages, forgetting the meaning – nothing was reborn. Even in a strange exotic style the difference between life and death was unmistakable.
The real Pekin Opera was an example of a theatrical art where the outer forms do not change from generation to generation, and only a few years ago it seemed as though it were so perfectly frozen that it could carry on for ever. Today, even this superb relic has gone. Its force and its quality enabled it to survive way beyond its time, like a monument – but the day came when the gap between it and the life of the society around it became too great.’
P19 ‘All the different elements of staging – the shorthands of behaviour that stand for certain emotions; gestures, gesticulations and tones of voice – are all fluctuating on an invisible stock exchange all the time. Life is moving, influences are playing on actor and audience, and other plays, other arts, the cinema, television, current events, join in the constant rewriting of history and the amending of daily truth. In fashion houses someone will thump a table and say ‘boots are definitely in’: this is an existential fact. A living theatre that thinks it can stand aloof from anything so trivial as fashion will wilt. In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it. In this sense, the theatre is relativity.’
p.20 ‘…if we try to simplify the problem by making tradition the main barrier between ourselves and a living theatre we will again miss the real issue. There is a deadly element everywhere; in the cultural set-up, in our inherited artistic values, in the economic framework, in the actor’s life, in the critic’s function. As we examine these we will see that deceptively the opposite seems also true, for within the Deadly Theatre there are often tantalizing, abortive or even momentarily satisfying flickers of a real life.’
p.21 ‘On Broadway, ticket prices are continually rising and, ironically, as each season grows more disastrous, each season’s hit makes more money. As fewer and fewer people go through the doors, larger and larger sums cross the ticket office counter, until eventually one last millionaire will be paying a fortune for one private performance for himself alone. ‘
p. 23 ‘…the subtle, sensitive inter-relation between people confidently working together.’
p. 23 ‘It is the audience, year after year, that has been forced to elevate simple fallible men into highly priced experts because, as when a collector buys and expensive work, he cannot afford to take the risk alone: the tradition of the expert valuers of works of art, like Duveen, has reached the box office line. So the circle is closed; not only the artists, but also the audience, have to have their protection men – and most of the curious, intelligent, nonconforming individuals stay away.’
P. 25 ‘In a sense, there is nothing a spectator can actually do. And yet there is a contradiction here that cannot be ignored, for everything depends on him.’
P.30-31 ‘ The Method Actor was trained to reject cliché imitations of reality and to search for something more real in himself. He then had to present this through the living of it, and so acting became a deeply naturalistic study. ‘Reality’ is a word with many meanings, but here it was understood to be that slice of the real that reflected the people and the problems around the actor, and it coincided with the slices of existence that the writers of the day, Miller, Tennessee Williams, Inge, were trying to define.’
P. 41 ‘Shakespeare used the same unit that is available today – a few hours of public time. He used this time span to cram together, second for second, a quantity of lively material of incredible richness…and the author had a precise, human and social aim which gave him reason for searching for his themes, reason for searching for his means, reason for making theatre.’
p. 42 ‘in other words, although the dramatist brings his own life nurtured by the life around him into his work – the empty stage is no ivory tower – the choices he makes and the values he observes are only powerful in proportion to what they create in the language of theatre.’
‘Today, when no conventional forms stand up any more, even the author who doesn’t care about theatre as such, but only about what he is trying to say, is compelled to begin at the root – by facing the problem of the very nature of dramatic utterance. There is no way out – unless he is prepared to settle for a second-hand vehicle that’s no longer in working order and very unlikely to take him to where he wants to go.’
p. 44 ‘Deadliness always brings us back to repetition; the deadly director uses old formulae, old methods, old jokes, old effects, stock beginnings to scenes, stock ends; and this applies equally to his partners, the designers and composers, if they do not start each time afresh from the void, the desert and the true question – why clothes at all, why music, what for? A deadly director is a director who brings no challenge to the conditioned reflexes that every department must contain.’
2. The Holy Theatre
P 47 ‘The theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible’
p. 51 ‘Goodwill, sincerity, reverence, belief in culture are not quite enough: the outer form can only take on real authority if the ceremony has equal authority – and who today can possibly call the tune? Of course, today as at all times, we need to stage true rituals, but for rituals that can make theatre-going and experience that feeds our lives true forms are needed.’
p.63 ‘To comprehend the visibility of the invisible is a life’s work of a holy theatre. A holy theatre not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions that make its perception possible. The Happening could be related to all of this but examine deeply the problem of perception. Naively it believes that the cry ‘Wake up! Is enough: that the call ‘Live!’ brings life. Of course, more is needed, but what?’
p. 65 [on Beckett’s use of symbols in his plays] ‘ a true symbol is specific, it is the only form a certain truth can take…They are theatre machines. People smile at them but they hold their ground: they are critic proof. We get nowhere if we expect to be told what they mean, yet each one has a relation with us that we can’t deny. If we accept this, the symbol opens in us a great and wondering O.’
p.69 ‘We can try to capture the invisible but we must not lose touch with common sense – if our language is too special we will lose part of the spectator’s belief. The model, as always, is Shakespeare. His aim continually is holy, metaphysical, yet he never makes the mistake of staying too long on the highest plane. He knew how hard it is for us to keep company with the absolute – so he continually bumps us down to earth.’
3. The Rough Theatre
p. 73 ‘ a beautiful place may never bring about explosion of life, while a haphazard hall may be a tremendous meeting place; this is the mystery of the theatre.’
p.74 ‘at the beginning of electronic music, some German studios claimed that they could make every sound that a natural instrument could make – only better. They then discovered that all their sounds were marked by a certain uniform sterility. So they analysed sounds made by clarinets, flutes, violins and found that each note contained a remarkably high proportion of plain noise; actual scraping, or the mixture of heavy breathing with wind on wood: from a purist point of view, this was just dirt, but the composers soon found themselves compelled to make synthetic dirt – to ‘humanize’ their compositions.’
p. 81-82 ‘Brecht believed that, in making an audience take stock of the elements in a situation, the theatre was serving the purpose of leading it’s audience to a juster understanding of the society in which it lied, and so to learning in what ways that society was capable of change.
Alienation can work through antithesis; parody, imitation, criticism, the whole range of rhetoric is open to it.’
p.88 ‘In all communication, illusions materialize and disappear. The Brecht theatre is a rich compound of images appearing for our belief. When Brecht spoke contemptuously of illusion, this was not what he was attacking. He meant the single sustained Picture, the statement that continued after its purpose had been served – like the painted tree…It would be better if we clearly opposed dead illusion to living illusion, glum statement to lively statement, fossilized shape to moving shadow, the frozen picture to the moving one.’
p. 89 [Chekov’s The three Sisters] ‘…each rupture is a subtle provocation and a call to thought’
p.91 ‘Where generations of film-makers had evolved laws of continuity and canons of consistency so as not to break the reality of a continuous action, Godard showed that this reality was yet another false and rhetorical convention. By photographing a scene and at once smashing its apparent truth, he has cracked into dead Illusion and enabled a stream of opposing impressions to stream forth. He is deeply influenced by Brecht.’
p. 95 ‘Whether the emphasis falls on the individual or on the analysis of society has become almost completely a division between Marxists and non-Marxists. It is the Marxist and the Marxist alone who approaches a given situation dialectically and scientifically, attempting to explore the social and economic factors that determine the action…this is because Marxism provides the writer with a structure, a tool and an aim – bereft of these three elements the non-Marxists turns to Man. This can easily make the writer vague and woolly. But the very best non-political writer may be another sort of expert, who can discriminate very precisely in the treacherous world of individual shades of experience’.
P98. ‘The power of Shakespeare’s plays is that they present man simultaneously in all his aspects: touch for touch, we can identify and withdraw. A primitive situation disturbs us in out subconscious our intelligence watches, comments, philosophizes. Brecht and Beckett are both contained in Shakespeare unreconciled. We identify emotionally , subjectively – and yet at one and the same time we evaluate politically objectively in relation to society. ‘
P98. ‘So it is that Shakespeare succeeded where no one has succeeded before or since in writing plays that pass through many stages of consciousness. What enabled him technically to do to, the essence, in fact, of his style, is a roughness of texture and a conscious mingling of opposites which in other terms could be called an absence of style.’
P 101. ‘…the ‘happening’ effect – the moment when the illogical breaks through our everyday understanding to make us open our eyes more widely.’
P102. ‘The sort of lay that Shakespeare offers us in never just a series of events: it is far easier to understand if we consider the plays as objects – as many faceted complexes of form and meaning in which the line of narrative is only one amongst many aspects and cannot be played or studied on its own.’
P 108. ‘If we do not understand tragedy, it is because it has become confused with Acting the King. We may want magic , but we confuse it with hocus-pocus, and we have hopelessly mixed up love with sex, beauty with aestheticism. But it is only by searching for new discrimination that we shall extend the horizons of the real. Only then could the theatre be useful, for we need a beauty which could convince us: we need desperately to experience magic in so direct a way that our very notion of what is substantial could be changed. ‘
P 108-109. ‘But if our language must correspond to our age, then we must also accept that today roughness is livelier and holiness is deadlier than at other times. Once, the theatre could begin as magic: magic as sacred festival, or magic as the footlights came up. Today, it is the other way round. The theatre is hardly wanted and its workers are hardly trusted. So we cannot assume that the audience will assemble devoutly and attentively. It is up to us to capture its attention and compel its belief.
To do so we must prove that there will be no trickery, nothing hidden. We must open our empty hands and show that really there is nothing up our sleeves. Only then can we begin.’
4. The Immediate Theatre
p.110 ‘The theatre narrows life down…from the first rehearsal, the aim is always visible, never far away, and it involves everyone. We can see many model social patterns at work; the pressures of a first night, with its unmistakable demands, produce that working-together, that dedication, that energy and that consideration of each other’s needs that governments despair of every evoking outside wars.
p.111 ‘The theatre, on the other hand, always asserts itself in the present. This is what can make it more real than the normal stream of consciousness. This also is what can make it so disturbing. ‘
p. 112’This is the picture of the author at the moment of writing – searching with a decaying and evolving theatre. As I continue to work, each experience will make these conclusions inclusive again. It is impossible to assess the function of a book, but I hope this one may perhaps be of use somewhere, to someone else wrestling with his own problems in relation to another time and place.’
p. 113 ‘In performance, the relationship is actor/subject/audience. In rehearsal it is actor/subject/director. The earliest relationship is director/subject/designer.’
p. 114’ Art lovers can never understand why all stage designing isn’t done by ‘great’ painters and sculptors. What is necessary, however, is an incomplete design; a design that has clarity without rigidity; one that could be called ‘open’ as against ‘shut’…the designer thinks in terms of the fourth dimension, the passage of time – not the stage picture, but the stage moving picture.’
p. 120 ‘I stopped, and walked away from my book, in amongst the actors and I have never looked at a written plan since. I recognized once and for all the presumption and the folly of thinking tat an inanimate model can stand for a man.’
p. 121’Let me quote a strange paradox. There is only one person as effective as a very good director – and that is a rotten one. It sometimes happens that a director is so bad, so completely without direction, so incapable of imposing his will, that his lack of ability becomes a positive virtue…However, when the director is plausible enough, stern enough, articulate enough to get the actors’ partial trust then the result can misfire most easily of all. Even if the actor ends by disagreeing with some of what he is told, he still passes some of the load on to the director, feeling that ‘he may be right’, or at least that the director is vaguely ‘responsible’ and will somehow ‘save the day’.’
p. 122 ‘Any director disappears, a little later, on the first night. Sooner or later the actor must appear and the ensemble take command. The director must sense where the actor wants to go and what it is he avoids, what blocks he raises to his own intentions. No director injects a performance. At best a director enables an actor to reveal his own performance, that he might otherwise have clouded for himself. ‘
p. 126 ‘Clearly the true and instantaneous inner reaction Was checked and like lightning the memory substituted some imitation of a form once seen. Dabbing the paint was even more revealing: the hair’s-breadth of terror before the blankness, and then the reassuring ready-made idea coming to the rescue. This deadly Theatre lurks inside us all.’
p. 129 ‘A creative actor will be most ready to discard the hardened shells of his work at the last rehearsal because here, with the first night approaching, a brilliant searchlight is cast on his creation, and he sees its pitiful inadequacy. The creative actor also longs to cling on to all he’s found, he too wants at all costs to avoid the trauma of appearing in front of an audience naked and unprepared. But still this is exactly what he must do. He must destroy and abandon his results even if what he picks up seems almost the same.’
p.142 ‘The only thing that all forms of theatre have in common is the need for an audience. This is more than a truism: in the theatre the audience completes the steps of creation. In the other arts, it is possible for the artist to use as his principle the idea that he works for himself. However great his sense of social responsibility, he will say that his best guide is his own instinct – and if he is satisfied when standing alone with his completed work, the chances are that other people will be satisfied too.’
p. 144 ‘a more profound difference can arise when the actor can play on a changing inner relationship with the spectator. If the actor can catch the spectator’s interest, thus lower his defences and then coax the spectator to an unexpected position or an awareness of a clash of opposing beliefs, of absolute contradictions then the audience becomes more active.’
p. 148 ‘In the theatre we always return to the same point: it is not enough for writers and actors to experience this compulsive necessity, audiences must share it, too. So in this sense it is not just a question of wooing an audience. It is an even harder matter of creating works that evoke in audiences an undeniable hunger and thirst.’
p. 150 ‘This is how I understand a necessary theatre, one in which there is only a practical difference between actor and audience, not a fundamental one.’
p. 152 ‘When a performance is over, what remains? Fun can be forgotten, but powerful emotion also disappears and good arguments lose their thread. When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself – then something in the mind burns. The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell – a picture. It is the play’s central image that remains, its silhouette, and if the elements are highly blended this silhouette will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it has to say.’
p. 157 ‘In everyday life, ‘if’ is a fiction, in the theatre, ‘if’ is an experiment.
In everyday life, ‘if is an evasion, in the theatre, ‘if’ is the truth’
CC's Curatorial Academy journal 