The Empty Space

Peter Brook, a British theatre director, opens The Empty Space with a deceptively simple assertion: Theatre requires nothing more than an empty space, a person crossing it, and someone watching. Yet the word "theatre" carries so much baggage, from red curtains to tip-up seats, that this essential simplicity is buried. To cut through the confusion, Brook divides the concept into four categories: Deadly, Holy, Rough, and Immediate. These sometimes exist in separate cities, sometimes intermingle within a single performance, and sometimes coexist within a single moment.

The Deadly Theatre, Brook argues, is the most common and deceptively dangerous form: not simply bad theatre but theatre that is depressingly active yet devoid of genuine life. Shakespeare, he contends, is where deadliness installs itself most securely. Productions appear colorful but are secretly boring, and audiences blame the playwright rather than the production's lifelessness. Brook also identifies a complicit "deadly spectator," the scholar who enjoys routine performances because they confirm his theories, lending the weight of authority to dullness. He insists that Shakespeare's words are not fixed literary objects but records of impulses that must be rediscovered through a creative process paralleling the original one. He illustrates this through a demonstration in which a woman unfamiliar with King Lear reads the first speech of Goneril, Lear's eldest daughter. Delivered simply, the speech sounds eloquent, but when the woman is told to play Goneril as wicked, she wrestles unnaturally with the text, showing how preconceptions distort performance.

Brook argues that theatrical style is inherently impermanent. He contrasts the Pekin Opera (Beijing Opera), which was still creating its ancient patterns afresh each night, with a rival company from Formosa (Taiwan) that merely imitated memories of the same material. He extends this principle to opera, arguing that because music's vehicle (instruments) is separable from its content while drama's vehicle (flesh and blood) is inseparable from its message, opera becomes particularly susceptible to deadliness.

Turning to economic conditions, Brook contends that Broadway's three-week rehearsal period cripples productions, contrasting this with the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht's theatre company, which spent about 12 months on each new production. Broadway, he writes, is a machine in which every part is brutalized to fit, driving away audiences through high prices and repeated disappointments and creating a vicious circle in which critics become the primary protectors against risk. Brook demonstrates how audience attention shapes performance: The Royal Shakespeare Company's King Lear improved touring through Budapest and Moscow, where audiences brought genuine hunger for the play's themes, but deteriorated in Philadelphia, where audiences came for conventional social reasons.

Brook credits the Actors' Studio, an American training institution based on the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian acting teacher and theorist, with developing a remarkable school of acting that trained actors to reject cliché. Yet he argues that naturalistic representation no longer seems adequate and that actors, once launched, have nothing to help them continue developing. He contends that critics should serve as "pathmakers" judging events in relation to a less deadly theatre, and that few contemporary playwrights match Shakespeare's ability to operate simultaneously on infinite levels. The director, Brook writes, is an imposter guiding others at night through unknown territory. The chapter closes with a pointed question: "Why theatre at all? What for?"

The second chapter introduces the Holy Theatre, which Brook defines as the theatre of the invisible made visible, grounded in the notion that most of life escapes our senses and that art reveals otherwise unrecognizable patterns. He recalls post-war Hamburg in 1946, where two clowns on a painted cloud listed unobtainable foods for a crowd of hungry children, and the squeals of excitement gave way to a deep theatrical silence. Yet Brook contends that the forms of sacred art have decayed and cannot be artificially revived: Over centuries, the Orphic Rites of ancient Greece turned into the Gala Performance. He examines Antoine Artaud, the French theorist who envisioned a Holy Theatre working "like the plague, by intoxication, by infection, by analogy, by magic." Brook and collaborator Charles Marowitz formed a group called the Theatre of Cruelty with the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to investigate these ideas. Their most important finding was that actors needed form: Passionate feeling alone was insufficient without a creative leap to mint a new shape containing their impulses.

Brook profiles three exemplary practitioners: choreographer Merce Cunningham, who uses classical discipline to achieve spontaneous order; Samuel Beckett, whose plays forge a merciless "no" out of a longing for "yes"; and the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, whose actors treat theatre as a vehicle for self-study. All three share intense work and rigorous discipline, but all three are theatres for an élite. Brook also examines the Living Theatre, led by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, a nomad community searching for holiness without tradition, and describes Haitian voodoo ceremony as a model in which the invisible becomes attainable through direct participation. The chapter closes by asking whether holy theatre should be sought in the clouds or on the ground.

The third chapter introduces the Rough Theatre, defined by its essential roughness: salt, sweat, noise, smell, theatre on carts and trestles with audiences standing, drinking, and answering back. Its arsenal is unlimited: asides, placards, songs, dances, false noses, and the exploiting of accidents. Brook positions Bertolt Brecht as the key figure of modern theatre, explaining that alienation, a technique designed to make audiences think critically rather than surrender to emotion, is a theatrical language as rich as verse. Brecht introduced the idea of the intelligent actor who judges the value of his contribution. Yet Brook warns that Brecht productions outside the Berliner Ensemble often achieve his economy but rarely his richness, and he critiques the Ensemble's own Coriolanus for rewriting the confrontation between Coriolanus and his mother to remove its emotional heat, thereby weakening the play's social argument.

Brook challenges Brecht's rigid separation of illusion from reality, arguing that the real distinction is between dead illusion and living illusion. He holds up Shakespeare as the supreme model, combining Rough and Holy in unreconciled opposition. Brook analyzes Measure for Measure, in which the stinking world of medieval Vienna provides the rough base against which Isabella, the play's heroine, pleads for grace. He offers a reading of King Lear as a many-faceted object. Brook begins not with the King but with Edmund, Gloucester's illegitimate son, whose natural anarchy makes him the most attractive character in the opening scenes. Brook traces the parallel arcs of Edmund and Edgar, Gloucester's legitimate son, analyzing Edgar's final lines as deeply ambiguous and compelling audiences to face a play that refuses all moralizing.

The final chapter, "The Immediate Theatre," shifts to autobiography. Brook distinguishes theatre from cinema: Cinema flashes images from the past, while theatre always asserts itself in the present. He examines the full arc of production, arguing that the best designer produces an "open" rather than "shut" design and that the director must sense the rhythm of rehearsal, knowing when to provoke and when to withdraw. He explores acting as a medium where the artist uses himself as instrument, profiling the actor John Gielgud's primarily vocal art and the actor Paul Scofield's unity of instrument and player. True acting, Brook argues, requires the actor to be simultaneously sincere and detached.

Brook proposes an "acid test" for theatre: What remains after the performance is over? When emotion and argument are harnessed to the audience's wish to see more clearly into itself, the play's central image burns into memory. He closes with a formula, "Theatre = R r a," drawn from three French words. Répétition (repetition) is the mechanical discipline of preparation. Représentation (representation) is the making present that abolishes the difference between yesterday and today. Assistance (the audience's active presence) transforms repetition into representation. Unlike life, where second chances are mythical, the theatre's special characteristic is that it is always possible to start again. "If" in everyday life is an evasion, Brook concludes, while in the theatre "if" is the truth: "A play is play."