Peter Brook
Before his introduction to tonight’s screening of Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade, IU Chancellor Michael A. McRobbie shares a preview of his remarks on the film and Brook’s legacy.
Peter Brook was born in London in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from Latvia. He was drawn to theater and film from his youth. After completing an apprenticeship at a documentary film studio, he arrived at the University of Oxford in 1942 with dreams of becoming a director. He found that the university dramatic societies were, in his words, “monopolized by possessive professors and well-entrenched third-year students who had no intention of yielding an inch of their territory to a newcomer.”[1] Not dissuaded, Brook forged his own path, studying languages, directing Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus — his first production — and founding the University Film Society, where he and like-minded students studied classic silent films and produced their own films.
Fresh out of Oxford at age 20 and exempt from military service during World War II due to childhood illness, Brook embarked on a remarkable career as a stage director, going from London club theatres to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre to Stratford-upon-Avon in a single year. He became the first director of productions at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden at 22.
He went on to tremendous success as a director on the West End stage, Broadway, in film, television, British repertory theatres, and the commercial theatre of Paris. His productions of King Lear, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream helped cement the reputation of the newly founded Royal Shakespeare Company. He directed such legendary film and stage actors as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, Edith Evans, Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh, Ben Kingsley, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne.
As theatre historian Arnold Aronson wrote in 2005, “In the second half of the 20th century, no director…had more influence or recognition than Peter Brook.”[2]
In 1970, Brook moved to Paris, exasperated by what he perceived as an aversion to experimentation among English audiences. There, he assembled an international, multi-ethnic group of actors, founded the International Center for Theater Research, and restored a derelict 19th-century theater that served as his home base for decades. For the next nearly 50 years, this company, in various incarnations and changing members, toured the world, constantly pushing the boundaries of theater with productions of incredible innovation and creativity. I was privileged to see them when they visited Australia in the early 1980s with Brook and staged three plays: Ubu, The Ik, and The Conference of the Birds.
When Brook died in Paris in 2022 at age 97, the acclaimed actor Glenda Jackson, whom you will see in tonight’s film, called him “the greatest director the world has ever seen!” He was, she went on to say, “constantly looking for something essentially true and deliverable to an audience. … He always felt that there was something to be discovered — and he was an absolute genius in helping (actors) find it.”[3]
Though primarily known as a theater director, Brook directed 13 feature and documentary films, from 1953’s The Beggar’s Opera starring Olivier to a 2002 production of Hamlet for television. Brook’s films were often versions of plays he had directed for the stage, including his 1971 film version of King Lear and two of the three films in this semester’s McRobbie’s Choice series.
Two weeks from tonight, the Cinema will screen Brook’s 1989 film The Mahabharata, based on the ancient Hindu sacred text of this name. The Mahabharata was compiled principally in the third century BCE and is claimed to be the longest poem ever written. It is roughly 10 times the length of the The Iliad and The Odyssey, combined! The scholar W.J. Johnson has said that its standing in world civilization is comparable “to that of the Bible, the Quran, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the works of William Shakespeare.”[4]
The Mahabharata tells the story of a war of succession between two groups of princely cousins. Brook directed The Mahabharata as a stage play in 1985, with a script by his frequent collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière. The nine-hour-long stage production toured around the world for four years. In 1989, it was reduced to under six hours for a television mini-series and about three hours for theatrical release.
Three weeks from tonight, on March 26th, the Cinema will screen Brook’s 1963 adaptation of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, which tells the story of British schoolboys stranded on a deserted island and their descent into savagery as they attempt to govern themselves. It is a sobering meditation on the fragility of civilization. Brook was nominated for the Palme D’Or for this film at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival.
The film you will see tonight, Marat/Sade, was released in 1967. It is a screen adaptation of the play by the German writer and artist Peter Weiss, which was staged by Brook for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964. With essentially the same cast, the play opened on Broadway in late 1965 and was a tremendous success, running for 145 performances and winning Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Director.
Since the late 1950s, Brook believed the problem facing contemporary theater was its inability to attain the richness of Shakespeare and other classics. The theater, he wrote in 1959, had reached “a catastrophically low level; weak, watery, repetitive, drab, and silly. Why are there no plays,” he continued, “that reflect the excitement, the movement, the change, the conflict, the tragedy, the misery, the hope, and the emancipation of the highly dramatic moment of the world’s history in which we live?”[5]
But when Weiss’ script for Marat/Sade came into his hands, Brook recognized it as “an extraordinarily daring and complex vision.”[6] However, when it came to making the film, Brook decided that rather than faithfully recording the stage production on film or expanding it with elaborate sets and more straightforward dialogue, he would “make a motion picture about the production of the play”[7] as Roger Ebert put it in his review. Brook retained the original script, primarily used the actors from the stage production, recreated the large communal cell of the stage play, and placed an audience that we see only in silhouette beyond the bars of the cell.
This film was made and released at a time of massive cultural, political, and social upheaval and change all over the world. I was then an undergraduate and it is hard to describe the impact Marat/Sade had. It was a movie that, if you had any interest in cinema beyond the pedestrian and quotidian, had to be seen. In fact, amazing though you might find this story, there was a cinema not far from the university I attended that showed it every night for about a year for little cost. I have no idea what their financial model was. Looking back, I think the intense interest in Marat/Sade was that its turmoil, its mixture of revolutionary politics and the questioning of the boundaries of sanity and morality, and in its sense of barely suppressed anarchy in many ways perfectly reflected those times.
The film features powerful performances by Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday, Patrick Magee as de Sade, Ian Richardson as Marat, and a stellar supporting cast.
Roger Ebert concluded his 1967 review of the film by writing, “Brook has achieved the very difficult. He has taken an important play, made it more immediate and powerful than it was on the stage, and at the same time created a distinguished and brilliant film.”[8]
With that, I hope you enjoy Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade.
[1] Peter Brook, Threads of Time, (Counterpoint, 1998), 22.
[2] Arnold Aronson, “Peter Brook: A Biography,” Review, The New York Times, May 25, 2005, Web, Accessed February 10, 2024, URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/arts/peter-brook-a-biography.html.
[3] Glenda Jackson, in “Actors salute Peter Brook,” The Guardian, July 4, 2022, Web, Accessed February 11, 2024, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/jul/04/the-greatest-director-the-world-has-ever-seen-actors-salute-peter-brook.
[4] See the Wikipedia entry on the Mahabharata for this quotation and the other facts about this work.
[5] Peter Brook, “Oh for Empty Seats!” Reprinted in The Encore Reader, (Methuen & Co, Ltd, 1965), 68.
[6] Peter Brook, Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook, compiled by David Williams, (Methuen London Ltd, 1988), 61.
[7] Roger Ebert, “Marat/Sade,” May 2, 1967, Web, Accessed February 11, 2024, URL: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/maratsade-1967.
[8] Ibid.
This semester’s McRobbie’s Choice series kicks off tonight, March 5, with Marat/Sade, followed by The Mahabharata on March 19 and Lord of the Flies on March 26.
Michael A. McRobbie served as the 18th president of Indiana University from 2007 to 2021. Prior to stepping down from the IU presidency, he was among the country’s longest-serving presidents of a major public research university. He was appointed university chancellor in 2021, making him only the third person to be appointed to this position in IU’s 200-year history. Learn more about Chancellor McRobbie’s work here.