He couldn't stop talking about it. 1. The book is a record of Brook's lecture about 4 forms of theatre; the Deadly, Holy, Rough, and Immediate Theatre, which he defined based on its impact to audience. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions. Passionate, unconventional, and fascinating, this book shows how theatre defies rules, builds and shatters illusions, and creates lasting memories for its audiences. It's written by a play director and actor who's studied the craft and really gotten a grasp as to what works or doesn't when it comes to plays and the way audiences (and the players, scene-setters, directors, etc.) What he wrote about Artaud was, logically, what I found most compelling. Very dense at times. Please try your request again later.This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. Please try againSorry, we failed to record your vote. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. Brook also shows how the arts can be manipulated to lull and pacify. A few hours could amend my thinking for life. In life, I see this all the time: meetings held "because this is when we have this meeting", corporate decisions guided only by the dead hand of expectation, dismal social conventions because that's how it was done 20, 30, 50 years ago. The Empty Space seems as important a study in theatre today as it did so many years ago when I first read it. If you can fight your way through it and you're in the mood for some griping about theater, give it a shot. Theatre is living and breathing. - "This is a picture of the author at the moment of writing: searching within a decaying and evolving theatre. " The "rough" includes everywhere but the big halls where carefully curated culture is served up for well-fed burghers. -"I know of one acid test in the theatre. I don’t think I’ve ever had a book make me think this deeply. It reminded me of why I fell in love with it in the fi It is very difficult, maybe even impossible, to write a book like this and not sound pretentious at times. He gives the example of psychodrama. “Peter Brook speaks of the theater of the past and the present, of its changes, of its various forms, of what he has seen and sees and of his own work. He describes important developments in theatre from the last century, as well as smaller scale events, from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting, from Brecht’s revolutionary alienation technique to the free form happenings of the 1960s, and from the different styles of such great Shakespearean actors as John Gielgud and Paul Scofield to a joyous impromptu performance in the burnt-out shell of the Hamburg Opera just after the war. What I found most interesting was Brook's examination of the role of the audience/spectator in theatre and how a "good house" can empower and participate with performers while a "bad house" can spoil a performance. The book is based on a series of four lectures endowed by Granada Television and delivered at Manchester, Keele, Hull, and Sheffield Universities in England. The Empty Space is composed of a series of lectures on the subject of theatre written and delivered by noted British director and producer Peter Brook in the late 1960s. I know it was talked about a great deal by teachers of drama who got their degrees/ diplomas in the 1970s. It is improvisation as well as theatre that allows for direct interaction with an audience. That said, there are penetrating insights lodged within, and many times I felt he had unearthed a Alternately brilliant and boring. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.
Too long to be chapters, they're almost like long essays. These, of course, can overlap and interplay at any time. There were some parts where I rolled my eyes to myself and thought "what hippy -dippy hooey is this?" During the 1950s he worked on many productions in Britain, Europe, and the USA, and in 1962 returned to Stratford-upon-Avon to join the newly established Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).