Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate

As a man of the theater, Peter Brook is more of a general than a visionary. A brainy and restless director, he rules his actors like a task-force commander, dispatching them on missions of dramatic exploration--most notably in his production of Marat / Sade. In a new book, The Empty Space, Brook displays himself as a man in the ironic position of being grafted to the theater while finding most of it lifeless. Based on a series of four lectures that he delivered to English university students, the book is divided into four sections: "The Deadly Theater," "The Holy Theater," "The Rough Theater" and "The Immediate Theater." Conversational in tone, it has an uneven texture that ranges from exact perceptions to fuzzy evangelism. Yet theatergoers who care about the nature and destination of contemporary drama will be drawn to The Empty Space with ravenous interest.

Nice and Decent. "The Deadly Theater" is an all too common experience. One has only to sniff the garbage that piles up on Broadway and London's West End every season. But Brook is interested in subtler forms of deadliness, an anemia that saps Shakespeare as well as silly plays. He feels that each drama must be reborn rather than merely remembered and repeated, and that rebirth is fully as difficult as birth. A play dies when too vast a gap develops between it and the life around it. The exquisite mandarinisms of the centuries old Peking Opera, for example, cannot sustain themselves in a world of Red Guards.

There is also a deadly spectator who helps kill drama. He is the theatergoer whose only conception of good theater is that it be nice, decent, reassuring and uplifting, but never marrow-chilling or soul-devouring. Playwrights themselves propagate dead plays, since most of them cannot fulfill the single most demanding requisite of vital drama: "A playwright is required by the very nature of drama to enter into the spirit of opposing characters. He is not a judge; he is a creator. The job of shifting oneself totally from one character to another--a principle on which all of Shakespeare and all of Chekhov is built --is a superhuman task at any time." What makes the playwright's task more difficult today is the death of certain theatrical conventions: "The lukewarm virtues of good craftsmanship, sound construction, effective curtains, crisp dialogue have all been thoroughly debunked."

Plague and Magic. How can a vivid experience be created? Brook calls for a "holy theater," and then searches rather desperately for a definition. At one point, he says almost longingly that "we have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony--whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals--but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow." Brook's deepest illumination about a holy theater comes from the French actor and critic Antonin Artaud, who conceived of the theater of cruelty as searingly holy, "working like the plague, by intoxication, by infection, by analogy, by magic; a theater in which the play, the event itself, stands in place of a text."

Peter Weiss' play Marat/ Sade was explicitly based on a cryptic plot suggestion by Artaud. As directed by Brook, it proved to be one of the most fecund works in the contemporary theater. The naked backside of Marat has turned the stage into a kind of auxiliary nudist camp. The tormented, writhing chorus of the inmates at Charenton popularized choreographic stage movement in straight plays, and the eerie sounds and gestures have become the language of antiword drama.

But has this led to a theater of holiness? Considering the offspring of Marat / Sade--Hair, Futz!, Tom Paine, Dionysus in '69--one scarcely thinks of holiness but of a kind of Corybantic Holy Rollerism. There is no deep ritualistic satisfaction in hearing the Dionysus in '69 troupe sibilantly repeat, "May I take you to your seat, sir?" in a seatless theater. Brook, of course, should not be blamed for his disciples. He himself expresses uneasy doubts as to whether the theater can restore rit ual or serve as displaced religion.

Sedulous Brainwashing. Drama may reach for the stars, but it must be rooted in the soil of "the rough theater." This is the popular drama of crude jests, false noses, stuffed bellies and fear in a faceful of flour. It is vulgar, grotesque and obscene, and it ranges from Punch and Judy to Bertolt Brecht, who argued that the theater should be like a prize ring.

Quite apart from his self-proclaimed roughness, Brecht is a particular idol of Brook's because of his contention that an audience should wake up and think, and that drama should be an instrument of social change. Brook accepts too uncritically the notion that Brecht wanted an audience to think for itself: no playwright was a more sedulous brainwasher. Despite his fierce ideological bias, however, there is no convincing proof that Brecht--or any other playwright--ever altered the course of a society. Reflecting the nature of a society is another question; all good drama does that.

Not Asking to Be God. In his closing section on "the immediate theater," Brook deals mostly with his own work. Immediate theater is uniquely a director's medium. "It is a strange role, that of the director," writes Brook. "He does not ask to be God, and yet his role implies it. He wants to be fallible, and yet an instinctive conspiracy of the actors is to make him the arbiter, because an arbiter is so desperately wanted all the time. In a sense the director is always an impostor, a guide at night who does not know the territory, and yet he has no choice--he must guide, learning the route as he goes."

If the territory and the route are the play, they are not always dark and unknown. A great play is flooded by its author with inner light, and it is usually some jaded director who drags the drama off on some footless side path and leaves it mired and mangled. The text is not sacred Mosaic law, but it is more than a pretext for whimsical directorial pranks. Peter Brook is not that kind of man. He looks before he makes his exciting leaps. He wants a theater of passion and directs his plays to that end. At his best, he is flamboyantly faithful to his own finest dramatic aphorism: "A play is play."

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