Peter Brook: Great British stage director dies aged 97
Written byTimes Magazine
Peter Brook, one of Britain's most creative and controversial postwar directors, died at 97.
Born in London, he fascinates and surprises audiences with his stage productions, which feature some of the theater's most respected actors.
His career has included Shakespeare plays, Broadway musicals, and films, including Lord of the Flies adaptations.
Brooke, who had lived in France since 1974, was reported dead in Paris on Saturday.
Peter Stephen Paul Brooke was born in West London in March 1925 to a Jewish immigrant.
He had no theater background, but his talent quickly emerged after studying at the University of Oxford.
In his mid-20s, he was a terrible old baby on the British scene.
Brooke left her mark on theater in the decades that followed and broke many established conventions. At age 20, he was appointed director of the Birmingham Treasury Theatre.
He soon moved to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and then to the Royal Opera House, where he worked as a production manager at La Boheme and Salome in the late 1940s.
He later told the news that he saw post-war British theater as "old fashioned, stereotypical and in the hands of a very conventional small number of people who made Shakespeare in the most boring way imaginable."
trapezoid and stilts
He continued to direct RSC productions throughout the 1950s, starring some of the era's greatest actors, including John Gielgud, Paul Schofield, and Laurence Olivier.
He has been responsible for several outstanding productions in London, New York, Paris, and elsewhere - plays by TS Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Shakespeare.
He was greatly influenced by Antonin Artaud's ideas for the Theater of Cruelty, which staged a theatrical season in London in 1964.
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