Words matter. These are the best Peter Brook Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space… the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.
I’ve always worked a bit like a cook in a big restaurant, where you’ve got lots and lots of things laid out and you go and look into one cauldron and you look into the other and you see what’s coming to the boil.
As a young man, I experimented with everything.
I have great respect for Brecht, but his path is not mine.
The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors, and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts.
Theatre is, occasionally, capable of moments of truth.
I never had a paying job that was not in theatre.
Every form of theatre has something in common with a visit to the doctor. On the way out, one should always feel better than on the way in.
When I was 18 or 19, my one ambition was to make a film.
The thing that I have a horror of is ideological theatre – Shakespeare never told us how to think.
Being with the mainstream isn’t very difficult – the tide is powerful, and it is easy to let it sweep us along with it. But going against the tide is very difficult. First of all, one must recognise very exactly what the tide is and where it is going.
Never ask yourself what you have learned… only ask yourself what are the circumstances which are different from last year. In that way, you can apply last year’s lessons.
Any scene in Shakespeare can be vulgarised almost out of recognition with the wish to have a modern concept.
No act of government can save the world.
An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?
I was raised in public schools, but from the word go, I never believed what the public schools were teaching me. Nor did I like the fact that they were fighting for the historical tradition of England.
I find, to my amazement, that I have reached the age of 90!
To be violent is the ultimate laziness. War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also an idol.
A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line, while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, ‘Take your time.’
Japanese children have infinitely more developed bodies than those in the West. From the age of two, a child learns to sit in a perfectly balanced manner; between two and three, the child begins to bow regularly, which is a wonderful exercise for the body.
