Peter Brook Quotes

The purpose of theatre is ... making an event in which a group of fragments are sudde nly brought together ... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up ... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life ... The marvel of being one.

It takes a long while for a director to cease thinking in terms of the result he desires and instead concentrate on discovering the source of energy in the actor from which true impulses arise.

An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?

One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance.

You become a director by calling yourself a director and you then persuade other people that this is true.

Shakespeare doesn't belong to the past. If his material is valid, it is valid now. It's like coal. The only meaningfulness of a piece of coal starts and finishes with its combustion, giving us light and heat. And that to me is Shakespeare.

Time, which is so often an enemy in life, can also become our ally if we see how a pale moment can lead to a glowing moment, and then turn to a moment of perfect transparency, before dropping again to a moment of everyday simplicity.

Because if one starts from the premise that a stage is a stage -not a convenient place for the unfolding of a staged novel or a staged poem or a staged lecture or a staged story- then the word that is spoken on this stage exists, or fails to exist, only in relation to the tensions it creates on that stage within the given stage circumstances.

Truth in theatre is always on the move. As you read this book, it is already moving out of date. it is for me an exercise, now frozen on the page. but unlike a book, the theatre has one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life this is myth, we ourselves can never go back on anything. New leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second chance. In the theatre, the slate is wiped clean all the time.

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. When we are persuaded to believe in this truth then the theatre and life are one. This is a high aim. It sounds like hard work. To plays needs much work. But when we experiences the work as play, then it is not work anymore. A play is play.

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.

The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful.

Preparing a character is the opposite of building-it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore.

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.

Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now.

Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.

A large part of our excessive, unnecessary manifestations come from a terror that if we are not somehow signaling all the time that we exist, we will in fact no longer be there

Theatres, actors, critics and public are interlocked in a machine that creaks but never stops. There is always a new season in hand and we are to busy to ask the only vital question which measures the whole structure. Why theatre at all? What for? Is it an anachronism, a superannuated oddity? Surviving like an old monument or a quaint custom? Why do we applaud and what? Has the stage a real place in our lives? What function can it have? What could it serve? What could it explore? What are its special properties?

The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

Many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life. They will maintain that Oedipus or Berenice or Hamlet or The Three Sisters performed with beauty and with love fires the spirit and gives them a reminder that daily drabness is not necessarily all.

There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him
if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.