Peter Brook saw acting as an uncompromising search for truth

Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThat seemed a severe contradiction. For the best part of the next two decades he was known not for silence, but for noise. For his staging of Seneca’s “Oedipus”, the actors practised primal screams for hours and imitated beasts. In Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”, murder-screams set off bursts of scarlet ribbons.

Amid the deadliness, Shakespeare still stood out. Yet despite a glorious roster of English actors the plays were produced as dully and dutifully as ever. He was having none of that. His version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1970 was set in a white cube with swings, trapezes and jugglers, through which the mazed lovers raced like butterflies. His “Lear” was a brooding, ironclad reflection on the power and emptiness of nothing.

Increasingly he was convinced that the richest tool he could use in theatre was the human being. In acting, an actor was his own field of work: his hands, his eyes, his heart. If a man or woman were simply to pour out all the emotion and imagination inside them, if they could make every moment count as theatre demanded, the audience would need nothing else.

His ultimate aim was to get to the very nub of acting, the communication of thought. Words bothered him, because they had moved too far from the original impulse. In exercises he derived from Meyerhold and from Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, his actors practised sending complex ideas to each other with one finger or one cry. In 1971 he collaborated with the poet Ted Hughes to produce a play, “Orghast”, composed in invented language. Events like this baffled the critics but were, to him, essential.

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