The Empty Space by Peter Brook

Author:Peter Brook
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon&Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

4

The Immediate Theatre

THERE IS no doubt that a theatre can be a very special place. It is like a magnifying glass, and also like a reducing lens. It is a small world, so it can easily be a petty one. It is different from everyday life so it can easily be divorced from life. On the other hand, while we live less and less in villages or neighbourhoods, and more and more in open-ended global communities, the theatre community stays the same: the cast of a play is still the size that it has always been. The theatre narrows life down. It narrows it down in many ways. It is always hard for anyone to have one single aim in life—in the theatre, however, the goal is clear. From the first rehearsal, the aim is always visible, not too far away, and it involves everyone. We can see many model social patterns at work: the pressure of a first night, with its unmistakable demands, produce that working-together, that dedication, that energy and that consideration of each other’s needs that government despair of ever evoking outside wars.

Furthermore, in society in general the role of art is nebu- lous. Most people could live perfectly well without any art at all—and even if they regretted its absence it would not hamper their functioning in any way. But in the theatre there is no such separation: at every instant the practical question is an artistic one: the most incoherent, uncouth player is as much involved in matters of pitch and pace, intonation and rhythm, position, distance, colour and shape as the most sophisticated. In rehearsal, the height of the chair, the texture of the costume, the brightness of the light, the quality of emotion, matter all the time: the aesthetics are practical. One would be wrong to say that this is because the theatre is an art. The stage is a reflection of life, but this life cannot be re-lived for a moment without a working system based on observing certain values and making value-judgements. A chair is moved up or down stage, because it’s ‘better so.’ Two columns are wrong—but adding a third makes them ‘right’—the words ‘better,’ ‘worse,’ ‘not so good,’ ‘bad’ are day after day, but these words which rule decisions carry no moral sense whatsoever.

Anyone interested in processes in the natural world would be very rewarded by a study of theatre conditions. His discoveries would be far more applicable to general society than the study of bees or ants. Under the magnifying glass he would see a group of people living all the time according to precise, shared, but un-named standards. He would see that in any community a theatre has either no particular function—or a unique one. The uniqueness of the function is that it offers something that cannot be found in the street, at home, in the pub, with friends, or on a psychiatrist’s couch; in a church or at the movies. There is only one interesting difference between the cinema and the theatre.

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