There was a delightful lunch held for Peter Brook and his actress wife Natasha Parry at the National Theatre yesterday. The hosts were the Critics Circle, honouring the director for his distinguished service to the arts.

And Brook repaid them with some good stories. He spoke of the old-fashioned florid actor who was singled out for attack by one reviewer. The company assembled the next day, knowing that he would have seen this terrible notice and might be destroyed by it.

The actor missed the half and arrived in the theatre at the very last minute. He told his colleagues that he had been in church, and had said to God, “Please forgive that filthy bastard.” The show went on.

Brook also recalled his days of dining regularly with Milton Shulman, saying that he was the only critic he knew who was not afraid to give a good notice to his friends.

He then turned graciously towards Charles Spencer, saying he was a good example of someone not afraid to give a bad notice to his friends. He admitted he had never found anything helpful in good good notices, or even bad good notices, but that the biting effect of even just one line in a good bad notice could often take him back to the work for reappraisal. 

Spencer proposed Brook’s health with Seymour Hicks’s goblet, noting that Hicks had built the Aldwych Theatre but not that the Aldwych was the scene of Brook’s greatest productions in the first decade of the RSC — Paul Scofield’s Lear, the Marat/Sade and his white box A Midsummer Night’s Dream (famously pooh-poohed by Benedict Nightingale, possibly helpfully, who knows, if it was a good bad notice).

Michael Billington spoke eloquently about Brook’s visual aesthetic, his unerring sense of theatricality (Brook once told him that an audience always needs a lift about four fifths of the way through a show), his pervasive humanity and his defining characteristic, curiosity.

Many older critics who had seen Brook’s work down the years were in the room — Irving Wardle, Anthony Curtis, Peter Lewis, David Gillard. Gillard, primarily an opera critic these days, asked Brook to sign his valuable first edition of US, the controversial anti-war play with the burning of the butterflies, while telling Brook that he was one of the volunteer audience who joined in the orgy scene of his notorious Oedipus at the Old Vic (some of the cast were lashed, moaning, to the pillars of the auditorium and a huge yellow phallus was wheeled on to the stage to the accompaniment of “Yes, we have no bananas”); Brook obliged by sketching a huge erect male member on Gillard’s title page!

Gillard was also bearing his first edition of Brook’s great book The Empty Space, a salutary reminder that he belongs not to the small-time fringe theatre awards that now bear that book’s name, but to the great European tradition invoked by Billington of Brecht and Beckett, of Grotowski and Chekhov, of Meyerhold and Stanislavskly; his name will be listed alongside theirs in perpetuity.

Although much slighter and frailer these days, Brook is still a  spell-binder. He had time to speak to all of us individually as well as collectively, and it’s just wonderful to share his company even in so fleeting a context.

I reminded him that we’d sat next to each other at the first performance in Belgrade in the mid 1970s of the Taganka Theatre’s glorious production of John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, the first time that great Moscow company, directed by Yuri Lyubimov, had been allowed to travel beyond Soviet borders in the East.

Brook loves Belgrade, and its theatre people, and has always been a favourite son, ever since his Titus Andronicus starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh travelled there in the late 1950s.

“Ah yes,” he recalled, “and Tito sat there in his box like a ruling monarch, and afterwards he insisted that we all join him in a pink lady — his idea of sophistication.” He conjured a scene, with a mischievous sparkle in his eye, and the whole world became a stage.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 10:35 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.