One of the world’s most influential directors talks to Brian Logan about a theatrical epiphany
Peter Brook’s influence on modern theatre is so pervasive that when he says a production influenced him, you can’t help but take notice. The renowned director – whose 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is considered a milestone in theatrical history, and whose book The Empty Space is a bible for many young directors – was affected by the 1973 production of The Island.
The play, by the South African writer Athol Fugard, features co-creators Winston Ntshona and John Kani and describes life on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela’s long-time prison. Brook’s rapt account of its opening moments, delivered in the front room of his London flat, is practically a work of theatre itself.
“Not a word spoken, nothing on the stage, for 40 minutes – just two men [shifting sand] with imaginary wheelbarrows, in an imaginary space. Gradually the audience went through a whole cycle. First amazement, then the beginnings of irritation – ‘We’re an audience, we’ve come for something, what’s going on here?’ – then impatience.
“And then suddenly the whole audience was transformed by a deep feeling of shame for having dared to think to themselves, ‘Come on, get on with it.’ Because we were not only witnessing actors showing something about people who at that moment were living that life on Robben Island; they were living it themselves.
“When one saw the reality of their sweat, the reality of the weight of the imaginary objects they were lifting, the audience dropped any expectation of the play ‘starting’. They realised this was the play, and waited, with respect and absolute involvement, for whatever was coming next.”
Brook has never forgotten what came next, and it partly explains why this fiercely independent director has lent his expertise to a revival. Last year he invited Ntshona and Kani, now in their 50s, to perform the play at his Parisian space, the Bouffes du Nord. Now he has coaxed that Market Theatre of Johannesburg production back to life for its run at the National Theatre in London until February 26. He remains excited by it. “What is extraordinary to this day is that you can see that the performers are not playing for themselves. They really are the spokesmen for their nation, and that is the ancient idea of what any artist and any poet is.”
In 1995 the duo performed The Island for Mandela, and the circumstances in which they return to Britain are a far cry from 1973. Back then the illegal production fled South Africa, and Kani, who is now the artistic director of the Market Theatre, had to present himself as Fugard’s gardener to gain entry to Britain. In theatrical terms, too, that world was a world apart. In those days, says Brook, “all experimental groups, including my own, were struggling to free theatre of the old complexes by which all that mattered was the text. I know it’s almost unimaginable today, but the body was ignored.
“Then suddenly into the Royal Court came two actors who had reached the end of this process, not through artistic study, but through suffering and social conditions. For them, communicating an experience could only happen through the total involvement of the body.” Brook attributes this to the repressive South African Pass Act, which “by dividing up the people into townships that were controlled and circled by the police, made instant and vivid communication very necessary and important”, because it could be violently interrupted at any moment.
The London audience was stunned by this physical expressiveness. “Here was what, in a way, mime was meant to be: the silent speech of the body, taken to such a point that the audience was forced to recognise that this was stronger than a documentary film.” Brook is famously uncomfortable with “political theatre”, but South African politics were a humanitarian issue. The Island was at the same time political and essentially human – its “other miracle”, he says. “Political theatre, when it was about serious themes, tended for that reason to be dramatic. Here you found that people who were right at the source, who had lived this, and whose families had lived this, could portray the situation with humour.
“These two men had a powerful way of living without meanness. Anger was there, but it wasn’t a mean anger; bitterness was there, but it wasn’t a bitterness that took away from the joy of living. The play did an enormous service for South Africa, which was to make the suffering South African not an object of white liberal compassion, but a rich human being to be respected and admired.”
Brook described in his book how, in his anti-Vietnam War production US, “the liveliness of the actors waned as the immediacy of the relation to their theme lessened”. He admits that Ntshona’s and Kani’s and the audience’s relation to imprisonment and apartheid has changed; hence the revival. Since its debut The Island has taken on an internationalist resonance; one Paris performance reportedly left two Kosovan refugees in the audience distraught. Its exhausting opening sequence “is even more moving with older men committing themselves to the effort. But while it’s tragic to see young people’s lives ruined by being imprisoned for life, it’s as tragic in a different way to see elderly men humiliated and forced to work in this way. So something has been transformed; something has been gained and has matured.”
If one aspect of this production reflects Brook’s passions, it’s the heroism behind its creation. It accords with his belief that “you have to be prepared to fight for what you want … You have to sense what the pressures are and choose. Either you go along with those pressures or you find all the possible ways of making a space for yourself. Nowadays there are new sorts of pressures. Today the cost of making theatre is so enormous it’s become a new form of institutionalising. Right now the most important thing to recognise is that money has to be spent on the right to fail.
“When John, Winston and Athol were working, they had the freedom that it cost nothing at all, so they could take all the risks that they wanted to take; but a system existed – apartheid – that made it almost impossible.” They struggled and won, securing a lifetime’s respect from Brook. “That need, to break out of whatever is the established system and take risks, is always there. But there will always be new ways to hold it back.”