Peter Brook's Dream.

While living in London, if ever I had a day purely to myself, I would take a wander to Spitalfields Market.  On one of these days, I happened upon the antiques market, and found a seller who had a stack of old theatre programmes that instantly caught my eye.  A lot of them were from early RSC productions and I delighted in seeing the names of actors who still race across our TV screens and theatre guides today.  I knew going into this stack that I would inevitably buy one of these programmes, and I settled on this, the 1970 production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Little did I realise, I was actually picking up the programme to one of the most influential productions of Shakespeare’s comedy, known as ‘Peter Brook’s Dream’, and the face-changer of how the play could be staged.  As John Barber’s review for The Independent described it, “Mr Brook has found a way of making Shakespeare eloquent to this generation”.   Furthermore, perhaps as an apt summation of Brook’s practices, Peter Fiddick wrote for The Guardian, “When Brook attacks in this manner he must have a target, and a totally blank-minded audience would be as a sandbag to a bullet.”

Admittedly, my motivation for picking up this particular programme actually came from the amusement of seeing Patrick Stewart in the early days of his career, those before he stepped onto the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation as the iconic Captain Jean-Luc Picard. 

Likewise, Ben Kingsley, before his stunning portrayal of Mahatma Ghandi in 1982 or as Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List, Dr. Cawley in Shutter Island or Georges Méliès in Hugo.  30 years previous to these roles, what do we have?  Ron Jenkins in Coronation Street.

As for Peter Brook, given that this production took place at the Aldwych Theatre only two years after The Empty Space had been published, I have no doubt that excitement for any gesture from him was rife.  As the man who wrote, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage” I believe it is he who must answer for a lot of the brilliant experimental theatre at large today.  Just as the actors continued to work affluently for the years after this production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, theatre continues to challenge convention, and, thankfully, the traditions of Shakespeare’s plays.  There is nothing I enjoy more than waiting in an auditorium like a sandbag to a bullet, so thankyou, Peter Brook, for all you continue to do.