The Author (Peter Brook)

In the 1960s and 70s, British theatre director and teacher Peter Brook was viewed, by theatre practitioners and audiences alike, as one of the most daring and innovative theatre artists in the world. His work directly, at times brazenly, challenged traditional ways of understanding, developing, and presenting theatre. One of his most famous productions was a staging of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which there was no set (other than a stark white cube), no costuming (other than mostly white every day clothes), and an approach to the text that focused on the realism and transcendent humanism of its intent, rather than on its poetry. As he describes in this book, he also was one of the founding members of The Theatre of Cruelty, a company devoted to the exploration of impulse and visceral emotion as a (the?) means of communicating with an...