Top 52 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Brook
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British producer Peter Brook.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
I've always worked a bit like a cook in a big restaurant, where you've got lots and lots of things laid out and you go and look into one cauldron and you look into the other and you see what's coming to the boil.
Every form of theatre has something in common with a visit to the doctor. On the way out, one should always feel better than on the way in.
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
To be violent is the ultimate laziness. War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also an idol.
It's easy to give up, and that's the one thing we cannot do. That's what gives me a reason for working: to leave people with a little more courage, with a little hope that has been nourished. Even if, of course, it's going to disappear, whatever touches one isn't lost forever.
Theatre is, occasionally, capable of moments of truth.
The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors, and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts.
When I was 18 or 19, my one ambition was to make a film.
A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line, while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, 'Take your time.'
I've always wanted to try things for myself before passing a judgment on them.
Being with the mainstream isn't very difficult - the tide is powerful, and it is easy to let it sweep us along with it. But going against the tide is very difficult. First of all, one must recognise very exactly what the tide is and where it is going.
I find, to my amazement, that I have reached the age of 90!
No act of government can save the world.
Every choice I've ever made has been dictated by a formless hunch rather than by strict logic.
That, for me, is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do.
I was raised in public schools, but from the word go, I never believed what the public schools were teaching me. Nor did I like the fact that they were fighting for the historical tradition of England.
Never ask yourself what you have learned... only ask yourself what are the circumstances which are different from last year. In that way, you can apply last year's lessons.
The meaning of a theater event is that none of us could see something so clearly as with the new energy that is brought with the meeting of a theme, actors living it, and an audience gradually entering it to live it with them. At that moment, a certain light appears, revealing what we would never have thought of on our own.
I have great respect for Brecht, but his path is not mine.
Any scene in Shakespeare can be vulgarised almost out of recognition with the wish to have a modern concept.
If, in English, we speak words, the French speak thoughts.
As a young man, I experimented with everything.
The thing that I have a horror of is ideological theatre - Shakespeare never told us how to think.
Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space... the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.
I never had a paying job that was not in theatre.
An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?
Japanese children have infinitely more developed bodies than those in the West. From the age of two, a child learns to sit in a perfectly balanced manner; between two and three, the child begins to bow regularly, which is a wonderful exercise for the body.
You have to live to the responsibility of the person who has won, which is even greater than the responsibility of a person who has lost.
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.
Reality' is a word with many meanings.
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.
A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.
Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now.
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?
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.
The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.
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.
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.
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.
I am ready to disclaim my opinion, even of yesterday, even of 10 minutes ago, because all opinions are relative. One lives in a field of influences, one is influenced by everyone one meets, everything is an exchange of influences, all opinions are derivative. Once you deal a new deck of cards, you've got a new deck of cards.
Tradition itself, in times of dogmatism and dogmatic revolution, is a revolutionary force which must be safeguarded.
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.
Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?
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.
Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.
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.
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.
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.
The closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness you aren't moved.
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